$180 million bond to fix public safety site?

The walls have cracks and water damage. The evidence room gets flooded. The elevators work — sometimes. The drinking fountains spit out brown water.

The Salt Lake City public safety building is in decay.

"Our motto has kind of been 'Make do and kind of do the best you can with what you've got to work with,"' said Salt Lake City police detective Jay Rhodes. "That we do. We become very creative."

Salt Lake City Fire Marshal Kevin Nalder said the building at 315 E. 200 South doesn't even meet the current fire code. That's not illegal, but it's not particularly safe.

"There's some issues that need to be corrected," he said Monday. However, "they don't have to be corrected because the building was built under a prior code."

Police and fire officials are pushing for an estimated $180 million in public safety upgrades that would include a new headquarters, an emergency operations center, a couple of new fire departments, a fire-training facility and an east-side precinct.

"What we're looking at is doing a public safety bond that will get all these things taken care of," Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank said as he led a Deseret Morning News reporter on a tour Monday.

The parking garage has been condemned, but the chief still parks there. A piece of tarp clipped to the ceiling hangs low over his car, collecting water and chunks of concrete that fall from above.

"It's probably the worst spot in the garage," Burbank chuckles. "The water builds up on it so you have to take a pole and push the water off."

At his feet is a large puddle of water from the latest spring storm.

Upstairs, an evidence storage room has holes in the roof, a moldy smell and the beams are split. The room has been re-roofed four times, but it still won't stop the leaks. Cars no longer park there because the floor is unstable.

Working conditions

Inside the basement evidence rooms, holes have been cut out of the ceiling because the plumbing system is falling apart. The pipes clog and water and sewage can flood. Inside one room, a piece of plastic hangs over boxes of evidence. The plastic sheeting cascades into a garbage can that collects the water.

"We have buckets all over the place, so when it starts, we grab them," said Ruth Ogletree, the supervisor of the evidence unit. "We have great big rolls of plastic, so when we notice it's going, we hurry and grab boxes and move them."

The police department has not lost any evidence to flooding, but Ogletree said they have had to repackage some of it when the boxes get wet. "Luckily, it hasn't been any major cases yet," she said.