There it is: Wake GOP wants public vote on 17-story Raleigh police tower
What took them so long? But today, the Wake Republican Party chairman, Claude Pope, called on the Raleigh City Council to hold a referendum on the proposed $205 million, 17-story public safety center. (There’s a nice gallery of the architect’s renderings up on the N&O’s website.) Bonner Gaylord and John Odom, the two new (or in Odom’s case, renewed) Council members, have questioned the project since taking office in December. Odom’s a Republican; Gaylord, officially unaffiliated, came in with a lot of Republican backing. There are a bunch of issues surrounding the plan — the cost, the location, the wisdom of tearing down an existing building so it can be replaced with a giant tower on-site — but whether the Council should decide them or let the public in iit hasn’t been part of the equation until now.
No one, to my knowledge, is doubting the need to replace the old public safety center — including Claude Pope. Still, it never hurts to check with the voters on big-ticket projects, if only just to show them you care. If borrowing $205 million is such a good idea — as City Manager Russell Allen and Mayor Charles Meeker say it is now that interest rates are at historic lows — surely the voters will see its wisdom too, no? Or maybe it isn’t such a good idea, and not because a new center isn’t needed, but rather that it’s the wrong building or it’s in the wrong place or it’s just the wrong year to be reaching into the public pocket.
If the city planned to issue general obligation bonds to pay for the project, under the state constitution it would need the voters’ OK. Instead, however, it plans to issue “certificates of participation,” which are just like G.O. bonds except that they’re not due to a legalistic fatuity dreamed up by the bond lawyers and their good friends in the various legislatures of America. The theory of a C.O.P. is that if Raleigh should fail some day to pay on the bonds, rather than go bankrupt, Raleigh would turn the building over to the bondholders — the “participants,” as it were. Yeah, right.
The real purpose of C.O.P’s, back in the day, was to avoid the voters while drawing on their credit anyway, albeit at a slightly higher interest rate for them to repay. Yes, I know everybody does it; but you know what your mother said about that.
Assuming, as I believe is the case, that Gaylord and Odom support a referendum, and Meeker and fellow Democrats Mary-Ann Baldwin and James West don’t, and are ready to approve the tower, that means two of the three other Council members would have to join the Gaylord-Odom bandwagon to force the question to the ballot.
(Or it may be that if four Council members insist on a public vote, the project will be postponed or relocated out of fear the voters would say no.)
Thoughts?
The GOP press release is below the fold. Continue reading »
