It was an act of administrative wizardry like no other.
How else to describe the dousing of Huntersville's hottest of hot-button election issues with a cool stream of pragmatism? How else to explain the disintegration of so many once-sturdy political platforms? How else to frame the disappearance of the most stubborn wedge between already pertinacious town commissioners?
"Amazing," Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain observed. "Just amazing."
And, so it was. Just a day after the Charlotte Observer proclaimed the need for a new police station as one of the two top issues in Tuesday's Huntersville elections, the town board anticlimactically eliminated the law enforcement digs as an issue at all.
Commissioners on Monday unanimously gave Town Manager Greg Ferguson the go-ahead to borrow $5.8 million to buy and retrofit a 26,000-square-foot stone-and-glass former alternative medicine office at The Park Huntersville, and make it the new home of the Huntersville Police Department.
The town didn't go far to find the funding for the project when it selected First Community Bank, whose Huntersville branch is the closest bank to Town Hall, less than one-half mile west on Gilead Road. First Community, which actually is based in Bluefield, Va., was one of four lenders who bid on the police station deal but won out by offering an interest rate of 2.9 percent. The town's first payment on the loan will be due Aug. 1, 2012, which means it won't have to find money in its current budget, which ends June 30, 2012.
"This is an aggressive proposal and I think you should be very happy to have it," Ferguson told commissioners in a briefing before their regular meeting Monday.
The town expects to close on the property in mid-December, with the police department taking occupancy by July 1, 2012. Commissioners' approval of the deal marks an abruptly mediative shift to what had been one of the current town board's most divisive issues.
While they agreed on the need to replace HPD's outsized and outdated 8,000-square-foot facility near the intersection of Gilead and Old Statesville roads, commissioners sparred over where the replacement facility should be built. In June, commissioners abruptly shelved a proposed bond referendum of $15 million to $20 million, originally planned for this past Tuesday's election, to fund the new station.
It was Commissioner Sarah McAulay — the holdout against building the new station on the site of the former Anchor Mill, just east of downtown and the proposed commuter rail line from Charlotte to Mooresville — who spoke for her colleagues in June to announce the scuttling of a referendum. And it was McAulay who got her wish that the new station be west of the rail line.
While the building needs some retrofitting to make it law enforcement ready, a beaming Police Chief Phillip Potter told commissioners Monday there are some things he might not change. One of them, he said, was the Little Mermaid-inspired montage on the walls of what had been a treatment room for children, and what likely will be a holding area for arrestees.
"I think it sends the message," Potter deadpanned, "that if you'd followed the rules of the Little Mermaid, you wouldn't be here."
Mayor Jill Swain liked the idea.
"It's probably better than the (former) colon-cleansing room I was suggesting as a holding area," she said.
