Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this series outlined how the City purchased a precast concrete structure to be used occasionally as a public safety substation in City Park.  If you have read the earlier posts then you might ask (as the agencies, Mayor, Council, and LCDC should have), “How could this project have been administered to better benefit the public and agencies while reducing the cost to the taxpayers?” I’ll try to answer that in this, the last in the five-part series.

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In Part 4 of this five-part series, I will try to explain how the City normally plans for and funds projects like the precast concrete structure in City Park.   Then I will show what the City did to circumvent the normal funding process.  The circumvention has an unintended consequence.

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In Part 3 of this five-part series, we will suggest who will benefit most and who will benefit least from the City’s putting a precast concrete building in City Park, a building being promoted to inrease police presence in the Park. You may be surprised and you should be concerned about who really won and who really lost. You may want to read Part 1 and Part 2 first.

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Part 1 of this series of five posts provided an overview of why putting a precast concrete building in Coeur d’Alene City Park to be used as a public safety agency staging point is a bad idea. Part 2 will reveal the City’s flimsy explanation of why the building is needed.  You may begin to wonder why the City Council and the LCDC didn’t demand more information before voting to spend $50K to $60K of your money on this project.

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It’s difficult to imagine that putting what is touted to be a public safety building in Coeur d’Alene City Park would be a serious misuse of public money, taxpayer dollars.  You need not imagine it.  It will be happening within about 90 days.

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The agenda for the June 3, 2014, Coeur d’Alene City Council meeting notes the Council will be asked to approve “…the funding and authorization of staff to negotiate a lease agreement with Eastlake, LLC. and expenses for an East Sherman Police Sub-station.”  The staff report (at online Council packet pages 40/61-42/61) presented to the City’s General Services Committee lists the address as 1424 E. Sherman Avenue in the body of the report.

According to the Secretary of State’s website, there is no “Eastlake, LLC.”  However, the website does list “East Lake, L.L.C.” with a business address of 1424 Sherman Avenue, Ste. 300, Coeur d’Alene, ID 83814.  Here is more information about East Lake, L.L.C. from the Secretary of State’s website.

Long-time readers may recall that in April 2008 OpenCdA raised strong objections to the City’s ill-conceived and wasteful Public Safety Substation in the Park.  Some of those objections came from the unwillingness or inability of then-Chief Wayne Longo and Captain Steve Childers to provide satisfactory answers to some fairly basic questions we thought Council should ask so it could determine if the proposal could successfully achieve the Mayor and Council’s objectives for public safety.

We think those questions and others still need to be asked by Council and answered by the present project’s proponents.  (more…)

OpenCdA’s post on April 13, 2015, titled The Coeur d’Alene Deception questioned the legality of the City’s planned use of approximately $925,000 of the proposed $6 million public safety bond for police expenditures, mostly equipment.

We pointed out that Idaho Code § 50-1019 identifies very specifically which municipal expenditures are permitted to be funded by bond proceeds.   Based on the explicit wording of subsection 6 of Idaho Code § 50-1019, we did not question the legality of any of the proposed bond’s expenditures which would be used exclusively by the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department.

However, we pointed out that nowhere does that section of Idaho Code make any specific or even implied reference to bonding for police expenditures.   Given the permission is granted to not only the fire departments but also other specifically-named municipal departments and functions (hospitals, cemeteries, public parks, monuments, recreation facilities, libraries,  aviation facilities, flood control, transit systems, and zoos), we conclude that for whatever reasons, the Legislature appears to have intended to explicitly deny municipalities permission to use bond proceeds for police expenditures.   The statute makes no references to vague possible associations using such terms as “public safety” or “joint use.”

We put our concerns in an email to Coeur d’Alene City Councilmen Dan Gookin and Steve Adams on April 11, 2015.  We simply asked, “What is the statutory authority for having the bond proceeds used for anything except the Fire Department?”  We have received no response from Councilman Adams, however Councilman Gookin responded in his comment appended to our original post.

We will comment on some of Councilman Gookin’s bullet points. (more…)

OpenCdA could not help noticing that at least according to the Sunday Coeur d’Alene Press skewspaper article headlined A matter of public safety, newly-hired Police Chief Lee White wants to equip the Coeur d’Alene Police Department with a mobile command center (mouse click photo at left to enlarge) and a crime scene vehicle.

He estimated the combined cost of the two specialized vehicles would be approximately $300,000.

OpenCdA thinks that would be money well spent, a very wise investment. (more…)

Long-time readers of OpenCdA may recognize the photo to the left.  It accompanied our April 21, 2009, post entitled Closed for Your Protection?.  It’s a photo of the City of Coeur d’Alene’s police substation that sits in City Park just behind the North Idaho Museum.

There was another photo, a more recent one, of Coeur d’Alene’s police substation in the news yesterday.  Taxpayers in Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai County who read the companion article from yesterday’s Spokesman-Review headlined WSU to look into CdA peeing complaint and today’s Coeur d’Alene Press article headlined Drinking and disturbing will observe in yesterday’s photo that the police substation was still closed for your protection.

Given the theme of yesterday’s photo, it’s ironic that in April 2008 we ran a five-part series of posts entitled Toilet Not Included. There were other companion posts as well, and all had the same theme:  This alleged public safety building in the park was a gigantic boondoggle, a waste of money intended to allow the City of Coeur d’Alene to put public money in the pockets of some of its favorite contractors.  (more…)

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I see by the article in this morning’s Coeur d’Alene Press that the Coeur d’Alene Police Department wants to spend $2000-$2500 to put a video camera at Independence Point to, “…help police monitor the complaints received about loud parties, crimes and loitering that take place in the evening hours there…”

Wasn’t the $50,000 spent on Boopsie’s Bunker supposed to accomplish that by creating a “police presence” there?  (See my five-part “Toilet Not Included” series.)