The readership of the Kent Reporter was treated (Sept. 12) to a tearjerking moment when Bailey Stober urged taxpayers to approve Proposition A on the November ballot, providing for a safer Kent in the form of a new police station.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
What really is needed is a new building \u2013 to make an administrative housing purchase for the employees of the police department, nothing more. This was not a safety moment Mr. Bailey provided, this was a uniformed emotional plea based on not so sound business reasoning whatsoever.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Let us look at the basics of Prop A: $34 million in new property taxes to build a new public safety building on the same property that the current facility exists. Now, this was a qualified estimate made by a paid for consultant. Let us take away the $800,000 for the rewire of the city jail, so $33.2 million divided by 48,000 square feet equals $691.66. Wow, almost $700 a square foot. The amount is ridiculous for a public office building at two stories. And it involves no land purchase, just demolition of the existing building.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Logic would have me propose moving the police station to the ShoWare Center and use that facility as a permanent move \u2013 a better and cheaper alternative than voting for Proposition A.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Vote no on Prop A. The city is “nowhere” ready to deal with this than they were when they ran full tilt head first into a stone wall with the ShoWare Center.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2013 Craig Dougherty<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The readership of the Kent Reporter was treated (Sept. 12) to a tearjerking moment when Bailey Stober urged taxpayers to approve Proposition A on the November ballot, providing for a safer Kent in the form of a new police station.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-7227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7227"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7227"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=7227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}