As it was at last year’s City Council retreat, a new police station for the city topped the list of priorities set by the council and mayor at this year’s retreat.

Councilman Larry Beeman listed building a new police station as his top priority. During the past year, the council has been looking for a site for the new facility, and it narrowed the list of possible sites to three locations. City officials are still in negotiations over one site, but might have to look again at other locations.

Rounding out the top-three priorities are improving drainage in the city and developing a strategy to get the public to “buy into” the city’s vision for its future. Before winnowing the list of priorities, council members came up with 50 issues they consider important, to whatever degree, and need addressing. Drainage was the third-ranked priority on the 2016 list of top issues.

Councilman Richard Brooks listed addressing the city’s drainage needs at the top of his priority list. After heavy rains and subsequent flooding late last year, several city residents — mostly in or near the Jack’s Creek basin — asked the council to quickly find solutions to the flooding and drainage problems.

Councilwoman Virginia Finnerty, who listed the “buy in” topic as her top issue the city faces in the next three to five years, believes getting the public involved in developing a vision for the city’s future is needed to help ensure implementation of that strategy.

The city made a “fair” offer to the owner of the former Dr Pepper plant site on West Third Street, one of the three sites the city identified as a possible location for a new police station, but the owner came back with a counter-offer that’s too high, Mayor Mac Hodges said. The mayor said the site-selection process “shouldn’t be as hard as it’s been.”

That site, bounded by U.S. Highway 17 business and West Second, West Third, Van Norden streets, once housed a Dr Pepper bottling plant and manufacture gas plant, which left coal-tar deposits — polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene and toluene —at the site. In 2007, Progress Energy and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources worked together on a project to remove those deposits from the site.

In June 2016, the former Family Dollar site at the intersection of North Market and Third Street (where Tumble B Gym is located) and the city-owned land at the northeast corner of the intersection of East Fifth and North Bonner streets were identified as possible sites, too.

Through consensus, the council decided to use a three-step plan for building a new police station — find a good site, design the facility and find the money to pay for the city. Currently, the city has $1.1 million set aside for the new facility.

Several years ago, the city began setting aside part of its general-fund revenues into a reserve fund to help pay for capital expenditures such as building a new police station. Of the city’s current property-tax rate of 50 cents per $100 valuation, just under two cents of that rate is designated for the city’s Public Safety Capital Reserve. Currently, that fund receives about $170,000 each fiscal year. The city is looking at spending approximately $3 million on the new facility.

At that rate, Councilman Doug Mercer said, it would take about 10 years before the city could build the new police station. The city likely would have to borrow some money and/or obtain grant funds to build it sooner, city officials said.

“We need to figure out where we’re going,” Hodges said.

For additional coverage of the retreat and the council’s top priorities, see future editions of the Washington Daily News.