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DURHAM – City Manager Tom Bonfield has promised elected officials he’ll present to them by April 1 a plan for replacing the Durham Police Department’s Chapel Hill Street headquarters building.
The pledge is part of the work plan Bonfield and the City Council have reviewed in the course of the council’s annual evaluation of the city manager’s job performance.
City capital planning assumes that a headquarters replacement is roughly a $40.4 million project, one that should be ready for construction sometime in fiscal 2016-17.
A study that’s supposed to cover the department’s facility needs and site issues is under way. However, funding for the actual replacement remains “unidentified, according to the city’s 2012-17 capital improvement program.
Police Department commanders have made it clear in the past they don’t think the present headquarters, a former office building, is well suited to their operation.
They haven’t yet convinced the council, but Bonfield opted to keep the project on the city’s potential construction-related to-do list when he pruned the capital program in 2010.
The manager’s work plan pledges attention on his part to a number of other issues.
Bonfield promised the council he and the city staff would complete in fiscal 2011-12 a downtown parking study and work with Triangle Transit to deliver a plan for revamping the Durham Area Transit Authority’s route network.
He also pledge to negotiate and recommend an agreement with Downtown Durham Inc. to implement a so-called “business improvement district” that would come with a property tax surcharge on downtown properties.
The council has approved the business district idea in concept but last spring opted against levying the tax surcharge in fiscal 2011-12. DDI has proposed using the extra money to pay for added clean-up and maintenance work downtown.
Some of the promises in the manager’s work plan were ambitious, such as one to reduce the number of boarded-up houses in the city by 10 percent.
He also vowed to work with community leaders to develop “a long-term plan to reduce violent gun crime” in the city.
“It’s not necessarily what’s easy,” Bonfield said of the work plan. “Easy doesn’t make it right. I never think about in those terms, that it’s easy or difficult. We’re going to try to accomplish every one of them, and we’ll see how it goes.”
