The City Has Sunk $40 Million Into a New Police Headquarters It Might Not Use

A ton of money has already been spent on a site that's now in question.

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OK, so a lot of people are intrigued by the idea of the Philadelphia Police Department possibly moving its headquarters to 400 N. Broad Street, the former home of the Inquirer and Daily News, as Philadelphia magazine reported this morning.

At this point, it’s still just a hypothetical scenario — although Mayor Jim Kenney didn’t hesitate to list a number of advantages to the site when he was questioned by reporters earlier today. (We’ll get to his comments in a minute.) In the meantime, we couldn’t help but wonder how much money the city has already shelled out as part of former Mayor Michael Nutter‘s previous plan to have the Police Department, the Medical Examiner’s Office and the Department of Public Health all housed in the Provident Mutual Insurance Building at 46th and Market streets in West Philly.

City Council approved borrowing up to $250 million to transform the 13-acre site into the Public Safety Services Campus. According to Kenney’s spokesman, Mike Dunn, the city has already borrowed $64.9 million, and spent $39.7 million on “acquisition costs, design plans, environmental remediation, selective interior demolition [and] exterior renovation, including windows and roof.”

Let’s not kid each other: That’s a lot of money. What’s unclear is whether the city would save money in the long run by moving police headquarters to the vacant Inquirer building, while still locating some city departments at 46th and Market.

If the city ultimately decides to stick with original grand plan that was conceived by Nutter’s administration, the project would be completed by the first quarter of 2019, Dunn said. It’s not yet clear how that timetable or the projected costs would be impacted if the Police Department ends up moving to Broad and Callowhill — or some other site, for that matter.

The planned move to 46th and Market wasn’t exactly embraced by detectives or police brass. The department’s current headquarters at 7th and Race is within walking distance of local and federal courts, City Hall, and other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the District Attorney’s Office.

The newspapers’ former offices would allow cops to remain close to all of those offices and the courts, as well as the highway. “The building on North Broad Street is available and vacant. It is large enough to do a bunch of things,” Kenney told WHYY reporter Tom MacDonald and other reporters earlier today. “You could move police headquarters in there. A couple of districts in Center City could move in there. We’d free up developable space in Center City, which is lucrative.”

Kenney said it could take up to a month to determine if the location switch is feasible. The decision, he stressed, is not a done deal. “We just started examining it. We haven’t even started due diligence yet on numbers, just whether the building could accommodate what we want to accommodate,” he said. “And then what would be the use of 4601 [Market]? I like kind of a health-related campus that will serve the community as well or better. But all of this is still up in the air, and we have not made any decisions yet.”

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