After a majority of Boynton Beach city commissioners pursued, full-throttle, a new police building along Congress Avenue, all five are now practically falling over themselves to postpone that effort. Plans for a move of the police station to the Renaissance Commons development on Congress Avenue — a controversial switch from east to west — have been put off indefinitely.
Most likely, city commissioners will review plans in its budget process later this year, City Manager Kurt Bressner said.
“I guess what we’ll do is wait and see what happens and as part of the budget discussion we will ask the commission whether they want to consider any manner of police facility,” he said.
That will be after March 9 elections, when voters will choose a new mayor to replace term-limited Jerry Taylor and two new commissioners will replace Ron Weiland and Jose Rodriguez, who are running for mayor along with five others.
The decision to postpone the move, made at a time of particular sensitivity to voter unrest, was just the latest twist in a complicated string of events.
Commissioners last year put out a request for proposals for a new City Hall and police station. Then they brought up the idea of having voters settle the question of whether to build them.
They then chose developer James Comparato’s Renaissance Commons location. Then they essentially dropped the City Hall project but finalized a referendum question on whether to build the police station, leaving it up in the air whether the Comparato project would happen.
Then, with a 3-2 vote, they dropped the referendum and decided to go with Comparato’s deal, which, at $15 million, they said was a bargain.
Now, they’ve thought better of it and postponed it.
Weiland, who originally pushed for skipping the referendum and going straight to a deal with Comparato, now has changed his mind.
“After a few weeks have gone by, I realized how much outcry was from the citizens to not move it — I’ve always been a voice for the people,” he said during the Feb. 16 meeting, to boos from residents who remembered his previous votes.
Commissioner Marlene Ross, whose district the station would move into, said she was going to make the same recommendation — before Weiland stole her thunder.
And Rodriguez, who has consistently panned the idea of moving either the City Hall or the police station from his eastern district, jumped into the mix, saying the whole project should be dropped for good.
“At this point in time, I don’t want to waste any more taxpayer dollars on negotiating this contract,” he said. “Enough is enough.”
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