Change is coming to Plant City.
The annual budget workshop was held Monday evening before the city commission meeting and several key projects were announced for the next fiscal year. One is a sad farewell, the other a promising beginning.
Despite big dreams for the former post office on Reynolds Street, the city officially announced it will demolish the old building. The city initially purchased the facility, which was built in 1935 and renovated in 1961, with hopes of restoring it and using it as a potential extension of City Hall. Commissioners agreed to purchase the building, its parking lot and outlying parking lots for $315,000.
At the time, they knew there was asbestos and mold in the building. Early reports showed it was “entirely manageable.” In fact, the preliminary assessments showed it would cost the city between $6 million and $7 million to rebuild a facility similar to the former post office, but would only take approximately $2.5 million to $3 million to renovate it.
The deeper the city dove, though, the more it learned that initial assessment was far from the truth.
“As part of hoping to save it, I had evaluations done and we did some internal reviews of the building,” City Manager Bill McDaniel said. “It will require too much of an investment to fix the problems they’ve found. It would be up to $2 million to just get it ready to renovate and then you have to add the renovation costs. It just doesn’t make financial sense to make that commitment. And believe me, I really wanted to find a way to make it work. But the numbers just aren’t there.”
Instead, the city will demolish the building for $150,000 and then assess the space, get a design and cost estimate and begin construction on a new facility.
The fact is, City Hall is filled to the brim and there is a desperate need for expansion. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the new facility will be home to an extension.
McDaniel said “anything is on the table at this point” and while its first purpose would be for an expansion of City Hall, he knows how valuable that piece of real estate is. The city would be “very open to the right type of development” if someone were to come along with a pitch. Nothing small-scale would do, but the city would be up for a conversation if the right idea was floated.
The workshop also showed a new project was around the corner. The City of Plant City will implement a body-worn camera pilot program for Plant City Police Department. The pilot program will begin Oct. 1 and PCPD will “develop deployment guidelines, update records management guidelines, introduce the program to the community, purchase the equipment and train all personnel” after a 30-day evaluation period.
The first-year implementation is estimated to cost a minimum of $200,000 and the annual recurring cost is estimated at $125,000. Part of the funding will be paid by the Local Law Enforcement Trust Fund and the balance will come from the General Fund.
This isn’t the first time PCPD has started to explore using body cameras. It’s been a long time coming and has been a main topic at several community conversation meetings between PCPD and the public. In 2014, the department used funds from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program to buy cameras for all of its then 40 patrol officers. Commissioners approved the purchase on June 9 and used $12,831 from the JAG grant to purchase the cameras and the memory cards.
However, the tech was still rudimentary and storage of the data became more costly than PCPD thought was reasonable considering the quality of the tech. The first generation of the “modern” body cameras used by police came out in 2005 in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t until around 2014 that police in the United States started to have a large-scale implementation of the devices.
While Plant City decided the tech wasn’t affordable enough then, other agencies embraced the change. By 2016, 47 percent of the 15,328 general-purpose law enforcement agencies had some quantity of body cameras, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Just last week Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister announced his agency would have 1,000 body cameras put into service to be worn by his deputies. Hillsborough County Commissioners approved purchasing and operating the cameras for $2.5 million in the first year. They then approved a five-year contract to operate the system for a total of $14 million.
McDaniel said the timing is right for PCPD to try again. When referencing the initial cameras the agency tested in 2014, he said they were “way too heavy and clunky” and there were too many concerns about storing the data.
He believes now is the time to start a pilot program, which will comb through a checklist of which equipment to use and analysis of how each camera stores the data, the cost of that storage and other crucial factors. McDaniel stated body cameras have “come a long way,” they’ve been resized and have added features that didn’t exist even two years ago. There are several options, so the agency wants to make sure it winds up with the best fit for the department, hence the decision to create a pilot program rather than make a blind purchase of a large quantity of the equipment.
“One that we are looking at would actually not only be body-worn, but they also offer a vehicle-based component as well so you could end up with both systems at the same time,” McDaniel said. “That’s the kind of thing that we are evaluating in the pilot program.”
The groundwork is well underway, McDaniel said, and there are already many meetings and demonstrations scheduled with some of the vendors of the technology.
“I would really anticipate that a decision would be made in the first quarter or the first half of the next fiscal year,” McDaniel said. “We should have all of the results of the trials and examinations from the pilot and be able to decide which system best fits our needs, and then make decisions on fiscal investments to make it happen.”