Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009 | 10:19 a.m.
About $660,000 will buy Boulder City Police new vehicles and long-awaited building upgrades in the next few months.
The City Council approved the car purchases and the contract for the police station remodeling work Tuesday. The vote came one week after the council met to figure out ways for the city to tighten its belt after it discovered a $1.8 million shortfall in the last fiscal year that cut its general fund balance, the city’s financial cushion, by about one-third.
The money for the cars comes from asset forfeitures, money that can be spent only on the Police Department, according to backup material provided to the City Council. The remodel will be paid with Redevelopment Agency and capital improvement funds that voters approved for that purpose.
Part-time employees at the Municipal Golf Course have lost all of their hours and all city facilities are cutting back, but that’s because of deficits in the general fund, City Manager Vicki Mayes said.
“We wouldn’t go ahead with this if it had impacted the general fund,” she said.
The $86,671 for a new Chevrolet Tahoe and a new Ford F350 is part of $430,000 the police received last year from the federal asset forfeiture program. The suspected drug money was part of $540,000 seized during a traffic stop on U.S. 93 in December 2007. After it was not claimed, the Drug Enforcement Administration returned most of the funds to Boulder City.
The Tahoe will be the department’s second K-9 vehicle, and the Ford truck will replace the existing, run-down crime scene vehicle, Chief Thomas Finn said.
The city postponed buying a new fleet of nine vehicles for the department last month as part of budget cuts to alleviate a $1.8 million shortfall in last fiscal year’s general fund budget.
The $573,121 for the building improvements comes from money left over from a 1982 voter initiative for police station improvements and from a 2006 voter initiatives that approved spending $500,000 per year for three years for capital improvements to city buildings.
The police station is being refurbished after the Senior Center vacated half of the building two years ago and the Police Department took over that space, Finn said.
The downstairs kitchen and cafeteria will be converted into office space. The remodel will allow for moving the “small, cramped dark offices” into that area, Mayes said.
She said the police station doesn’t have adequate office space, or even room for files.
The project is necessary, and the city got a good price in the down economic climate, Mayes said. Some bids had come in at $1.1 million.
The construction should start mid-February and finish in 120 days, Scott Hansen, director of public works, said.
Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or [email protected].
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