Copyright 2009 Deseret News
Haley Takoch, an evidence technician with the Salt Lake City Police Department, points to yellow stains on the ceiling and the plastic that covers the shelves filled with clues from the city's robberies, assaults and homicides.
"We get a lot of leaks — and it's not just water," Takoch tells a small group of people.
With officials hoping to give voters a better look at why city leaders are pushing a $125 million bond issue in the midst of a recession, the stains and smells and broken glass are the main attractions on the weekly public tours members of the police department have led the past two months.
Early polling numbers have shown a strong support for bonding.
A new Desert News/KSL-TV poll shows 60 percent of Salt Lakers would vote in favor of Proposition 1, which would pay for a new public-safety complex. Twenty-nine percent of the 415 people surveyed by Dan Jones & Associates last week said they would not support the bond.
The poll has a margin of error of 5 percent, and its results are nearly identical to a Deseret News survey of voters in September.
But while most voters seem to agree on the need for replacing the run-down and cramped public-safety building on 200 South, the mayor's preferred choice of where to build the new buildings has some voters concerned about voting yes.
Building a public-safety building and emergency-operations center across from Library Square on the east side of 300 East would be "an unfortunate urban design decision" that would do nothing to "entice private development," said Steven Goldsmith, a University of Utah planning professor and the city's planning director under Mayor Rocky Anderson.
"You don't see a lot of great development happening around public-safety buildings," Goldsmith said.
Instead, he said, the award-winning Salt Lake City Main Library and The Leonardo should anchor a "cultural," high-density, mixed-use neighborhood.
"It's the kind of place that could be drawing down university professors, students and seniors who want to be back in the core of the city," Goldsmith said.
Salt Lake City voter Jim Webster supports the bond but opposes the proposed site.
"It's just baffling to me that they want to do this," Webster said. "This idea that it needs to be within walking distance of City Hall — that is not a mandate or even a criterion in any other city. It's just something they dreamed up, it seems to me."
Helen Langan, a senior adviser to the mayor, said naming a preferred site for the complex was necessary after a similar bond measure narrowly failed in 2007.
"One of the criticisms at the time was that the city didn't give voters any information about where the new public-safety building might be constructed," Langan said in an e-mail. "Many felt that the city needed to have a better idea of where they might locate the buildings before asking taxpayers for such a large sum of money."
But, she said, "the final decision on the location has not been made."
Still, the Barnes Bank block "most closely met" the mayor's criteria for the public-safety complex and remains his preferred site for the project.
Inside the current public-safety building, police spokeswoman Lara Jones says, the department now squeezes nearly 600 employees into a building meant for 275. Jones points to one of the 63 cracked windows and the shoddy elevator system — all of which, she says, are too expensive to replace.
The $125 million bond would bump property taxes $6 a month on a $260,000 home and add about $43 a month to businesses valued at $1 million.
"We know what we're asking of the community," she says. "We know that's a lot to ask. The silver lining in this economy is the low interest rates and construction costs."
Jones leads the tour of five or six voters out of the evidence room.
"Let's get out of here," she says. "This place makes me nauseated."
e-mail: afalk@desnews.com