It’s easy to understand why members of the Albany City Council are so torn over how to allocate the money they won for the city in the Pepsi settlement. There are dozens of ways to spend or invest the money, and most of them sound just about as sensible as the others.

At the top of the issues now is whether to spend maybe $7 million or so on a new police station on the four acres the city bought for that purpose last year at Pacific Boulevard and 24th Avenue.

Police Chief Ed Boyd says his top estimate of the cost is $9 million, but he’s hopeful it can be built for less and the county will buy the existing station for use by the sheriff’s office next door.

If the new station is not built and the department remains where it is for five to seven years, Boyd says the old station will have to add a modular unit and replace the heating and ventilation system at around $2 million.

Given the decision the council made last year to buy the new site, it would be sensible for it now to go ahead and push this project through.

But council members who are against spending a big chunk of the Pepsi money on the new police headquarters now also have an important point. Bearing in mind the goal of the Pepsi project, they want to allocate much of the money in a way to help the economy in the long run.

One sensible way to do that is to build the start of the planned 53rd Avenue extension eastward, partly because the design has been done and should not be wasted, partly because this would open up a good-size property for commercial development, and partly because doing so would get further work on that road later on out of the supervisory clutches of ODOT.

It turns out that these goals are not mutually exclusive. Right at the start, weeks ago, the council looked at a plan outlined by Stewart Taylor, the city finance director, which accomplished the police station now, various other prudent allocations at the same time, and the fire station in a few years.

Had the council adopted that plan, it could have saved itself a lot of jawing and seat time. It’s not too late. (hh)