To say Cape Girardeau's police station is cramped is like saying Peyton Manning is a so-so quarterback.
It dates to 1975, and was designed to house a police department half the size of the one today. It used to hold 59 people. Now it’s bursting at the seams with close to 100. As the police department grew over the decades, officers found themselves crammed into every nook. Some even have offices in closets, according to police officer Darin Hickey.
“We’re just to the point to where we’re twice the size in manpower than what this building was designed for,” Hickey said.
Hickey was standing next to a double-wide trailer beside the police department. For the last five years, that trailer, without running water, has served as office space for 23 police officers because there’s no room for them in the main building.
There are other problems, too. There have been roof leaks, flooded parking lots and everything from the jail to IT needs an update.
But the bottom line is, they are running out of space.
“You’ve got to have the room for the interviews. You’ve got to have the room for storage. You have to have the room for officers to work and to sit down at a computer to type out their reports,” Hickey said. “Space is always a need.”
The city’s one percent restaurant sales tax will expire next year. The tax has traditionally been used for large infrastructure projects that are related to hospitality and tourism. It generates about $1.3 million per year, and it helped fund the Show Me Center, and later the Osage and Shawnee Centers. Now, it’s paying off bonds for the River Campus.
Some council members might try to bring the tax back to voters, this time to fund a new police headquarters, a move that Mayor Harry Rediger supports.
“We either need to expand the facility or build a new facility. It is our greatest infrastructure need within the city, past the wastewater treatment plant that is underway and being built now,” Rediger said.
A preliminary cost estimate for a new police station came in at $15 to $16 million, but city officials are trying to get the price tag down to about $12 million.
But not all city council members are on board with this plan. Councilmember Trent Summers says the restaurant tax has a good history of enhancing the community. He wants to let it expire, and bring a new tax or bond issue before voters to fund the police station.
“Obviously it would be the easier approach to continue to tax without letting it expire. No question. But I think it would demonstrate trust in the voters that we can be upfront and say, look, this has served its purpose and although we do have other needs we’re going to present them on their own and not try to fit them under this existing source,” Summers said.
About 70 percent of the restaurant tax revenue comes from out-of-towners, and for now, city officials don’t have a ready-to-go recreation project
Without it, Summers is hesitant about using the same tax for police.
“It my mind it just doesn’t make sense and it’s a little bit of, I think, not deceptive, but a misrepresentation to them, now take that tax and then reapply it towards something that’s more public safety related,” Summers said.
Mayor Rediger said there’s a good chance the city could land a minor league baseball team in the next few years, perhaps a St. Louis Cardinals affiliate. The city would need to provide funding for a new stadium, exactly the type of project the restaurant tax would typically fund. Even if that tax is tied up with the police station, Rediger thinks the city could find revenue to make something like that work, perhaps through the capital improvement tax or park tax.
