Police close Good Hope precinct

Cape Girardeau's Good Hope Street substation opened in 1998 to help combat crime in the southside neighborhood where drug dealing was rampant. Nearly seven years later, police quietly have moved out of the rented building as a cost-cutting move.

Faced with high maintenance and utility expenses and the loss of federal funding for the substation, police chief Steve Strong said he could no longer justify the cost.

The city council, including councilman and former police officer Charlie Herbst, agreed with the move.

"It is pure and simple a financial decision," Mayor Jay Knudtson said.

Police officers spent part of Wednesday moving desks and other office furniture into the second-floor, former library in the vacant Schultz School building on Pacific Street.

The Cape Girardeau School District is providing the space rent free as renovation work continues on the first floor. The school district plans to house its alternative school there by the end of the summer.

The police move is temporary. The second-floor quarters will be used to provide added office space for the next six to eight months for police and nuisance abatement officers until a city-owned house behind the main police station is renovated. The temporary office space won't be open to the public.

Police said they're not abandoning the city's southside neighborhoods. Officers Rick Schmidt and Ike Hammonds, who both worked out of the substation for several years, said the substation no longer is a center of police activity.

There's less crime in the Good Hope area now, the result of years of stepped-up law enforcement, they said.

The substation helped improve the relationships between police and residents in the neighborhood, the officers said. At one time, at least five police and animal control officers worked out of the substation.

The federally funded Weed and Seed anti-crime program had an office in the substation. A local neighborhood watch group met in the building.

"We had gun safety classes down here," Schmidt said. "We used the heck out of this building."

Neighborhood volunteers manned the front desk and residents often stopped in to chat with the officers. But over time, fewer residents stopped by.

"The volunteers dropped off because they didn't have anything to do," Strong said.

Water leaks from a second-floor apartment in the building damaged the computer equipment and forced officers to have to come to the main station to file their reports, the police chief said.

The front door to the substation has been locked up much of the time in recent years since no volunteers were working the front desk.

Still, the city kept the substation because of the need for additional office space to alleviate overcrowding at police headquarters, Strong said.

But then funding from the federal Weed and Seed program for Cape Girardeau ran out last fall, he said. The anti-crime program paid the substation's $350 monthly rent plus utilities.

The city, Strong said, now owes at least $1,200 in utility expenses, with the utility cost averaging $400 a month.

The city wasn't charged rent in recent months by the building's owner. Even so, there were costly repairs that would have had to have been made to stay in the building, the police chief said.

"I didn't want to accumulate any more expense, he said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123