Police service is the family business for the Bennetts. My brother, Craig, and I have a combined four decades as cops between us. I retired just a few short years ago and I miss my time serving this community every day. I will be the first one to tell you, a new police station in Puyallup was long overdue. I worked at the old one for decades. That building was built before I was born, and you could smell the age and decay in the walls. I was happy to see my pals on the force get a new home base. The city building a new station was never the issue.
The issue is that they ROYALLY screwed it up.
When it comes to supporting police in our city, no expense should be spared. It is my commitment on this Council to ensure that the Puyallup PD has the support, resources, and equipment to do their job and keep our community safe. What that doesn’t mean is that I will ignore the will of the voters to build brand new infrastructure without their say-so. That is exactly what we saw happen over the past few years.
In the Fall of 2021, the City launched a bond measure in that year’s municipal elections proposing a new public safety building housing a new police station, jail, and municipal court- for the low, low price of $83 million. The voters rejected it, and it just barely missed the legal threshold for the bond to get approved. Hoping that was just a fluke, they put nearly the exact same proposal on the ballot again in 2022- and it lost by about 3% more than it did the first time around. You would have thought this Council had gotten the idea by now, that the price was too high, and if we wanted a new police station we would have to figure out a way to make it more efficient and feasible enough for the taxpayer to hang their hat on. But that’s not what happened. They put it on a third ballot in 2023- this time asking for $76 million and tabling the new Municipal Court plans (and keeping the current one- which is a rental already). Crafty, sure. This time voters still rejected it- with only 47% voting yes on the proposal. For three straight elections, voters said NO.
What did Mayor Kastama, and the rest of the Council do? They built the damn thing anyway.
Well, maybe ‘built’ is a stretch. No new buildings were created. That’s the neat part- instead of at least creating a new police station from scratch on city-owned land as they initially proposed, they decided to lease the building from a different company. A rental. So instead of building a permanent new installation that we could eventually pay off, our city’s greatest public servants are now tenants, and the city is paying exorbitant amounts of rent just to run a police force.
Let’s break down the price tag of this. The reported 30-year estimate of those lease payments will be roughly $114 million alone. You also have to account for the renovations that will be made to the building to make it into a police station. The building manager is kicking in a few million- but the city will foot most of that bill- at $25.4 million. Add that up, you’re paying $140 million for a new police station that the City of Puyallup doesn’t even own.
Instead of building a real, permanent headquarters on the land taxpayers already own, the City Council struck a deal to rent space in the Benaroya Business Park out on South Hill. That’s where the new police station will sit- not downtown, not owned by the city, but leased from a private developer for the next thirty years. The price tag- $140 million Puyallup taxpayer dollars (the city never released that number themselves- you tend to wonder why). The Council’s argument is that leasing will “save money” compared to construction, but that only works if you ignore the fact that, in the end, we’ll have nothing to show for it. No building. No equity. No asset we can pass down to the next generation. We’ll be paying rent, and after three decades of checks cut to a landlord, we’ll be right back where we started- still without a station of our own.
What can we do about it, once we get into office? I will be frank folks- this is a big mess to clean up, and most of this funding has already been promised by this council. That said, I believe that nothing is non-negotiable and we can certainly explore our options. I can promise, however, one thing. My promise is that whenever we’re looking at new spending, the first people I will talk to about it will be the voters. Not contractors, developers, police department heads, or the bosses of the police union- I will not heed to their influence. It will be the voters, and if the voters say that they don’t want their taxes raised for new projects, I will listen to them. If the voters reject a new spending initiative, I will listen to them the first time and work to prevent those expenditures. Even further, when it comes to that kind of big spending- it’s going to be on what the voters want. Fixing our aging infrastructure, new programs for our youth and elderly, adding real vibrancy to our downtown. Imagine what you could do with $73 million dollars.
This Council wants you to be a rubber stamp to their pre-existing agenda, and if you don’t approve, they’ll just ram it through anyway. That ends now. The era of arrogance and cunning ambiguity is over, and the era of transparency and democratic decision-making begins this November. This is our city.
Jeff Bennett for Puyallup City Council 
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