The Nashville Town Council will discuss again this afternoon whether or not to make an offer on a building for a new police station.
The topic first came up in public at a special meeting Wednesday morning. The council had discussed the purchase of property in an earlier executive session, then brought it to a vote at this public meeting.
Before the council could vote on presenting an offer to the seller, the only audience member, Bruce Gould, stood up.
He asked if the building they were considering was the First Merchants Bank next door. Council President Jane Gore said it was.
Then he asked why the town was thinking about spending more money on a new asset when it can’t seem to take care of the assets it has, like streets, sidewalks and drainage, and its budget overall seems tight.
When Gould was on the town council in the ’90s, they discussed combining the Nashville police and Brown County sheriff’s departments, he said. He wanted the council to hold off on buying a new building for police until it could look at a possible consolidation, which wouldn’t require the town to own any police station.
Nashville Chief of Police Ben Seastrom said he discussed that with the previous sheriff. That sheriff wasn’t interested, and it wasn’t cost-effective, Seastrom said. If town officers became county officers, the town would have to pay into Nashville officers’ retirement funds to bring them up to the county’s level, and to restripe cars and buy new uniforms to make them the same as the county’s, he said. Seastrom also was told that Nashville officers could “compete” for their jobs.
He said the whole town police department runs on $380,000 total now.
“In my mind, it’s not effective for the town to not have that, but I’m also fighting for my job, because we would all lose our jobs if that happens,” Seastrom said.
If the town were to make an offer on the bank building, it would be contingent upon selling the current Nashville police station on Hawthorne Drive, Gore said.
Buying the bank building also would require renovations to enclose the drive-up lanes and make them workable space. The council didn’t have hard estimates on what that would cost.
The town’s interest in buying it comes from it being a smaller space than what they have now and closer to Town Hall, Gore said.
The town bought the current Nashville police station, the former Christole building, in 2012 for $399,999, with a down payment. As of the end of 2018, the town still owed $206,114.40 on the loan principal; payments were $18,935.04 per year, said Nashville Clerk-Treasurer Brenda Young. It was to be paid off in 2032.
Before moving into the Hawthorne Drive station, Nashville police were working out of a back office and hallway of Town Hall.
The town now employs six full-time officers, three part-time officers and a crisis intervention advocate.
Town council member Nancy Crocker volunteered to research the police consolidation idea. Gore said the council could not ethically vote to make an offer on the bank building while simultaneously exploring this completely different option; it wouldn’t be fair to the seller.
Young also was to bring numbers to the council about how much property tax money the bank building is bringing into the town now. If it became government property, it would go off the tax rolls.
The meeting will start at 1 p.m. today (Friday, March 8) at Town Hall, 200 Commercial St.
2:25 p.m. UPDATE: The town council decided to go forward with making an offer on this property. They opted to study possible police force consolidation as a longer-term project. Even if consolidation was something they eventually wanted to do, the new police station could be repurposed, said council member Anna Hofstetter.
