Residents are invited to tour the new University Place police station inside the civic and library building Thursday, Feb. 9.

City Council members, public safety commission members, city staff and personnel from the city police department and Pierce County Sheriff’s Office will gather for a ribbon-cutting ceremony and presentations starting promptly at 4 p.m. Tours will follow.

The police moved out of the nearby station for West Pierce Fire and Rescue when the agency needed more room following the voter-approved merger of the Lakewood and University Place fire districts.

The ceremony comes as the sheriff’s office, in consultant with …

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The University  Place City Council will consider three alternatives for constructing a flagpole in front of the civic and library building at tonight’s meeting.

Two of the options would install a flagpole in front of the building or next to the public plaza in front of it. The third would install a bracket to fly the flag from the building’s tile facade.

The costs range from $5,255 to $24,785.

The discussion is scheduled to get underway at 8:20 p.m. during the study session portion of the meeting.

The presentation (including some laudable use of Photoshop) follows:

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The City of University Place welcomes the public for an open house and tours of its new police station on Thursday at 4 p.m. The headquarters opened for business at the end of November. It’s located on the second floor of the Town Center Civic Building, 3609 Market Place West, Suite 201.

The Police Department, which is a detachment of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, was previously located in the Public Safety Building at 3631 Drexler Drive West. The police force had been roommates there with West Pierce Fire & Rescue, and both agencies decided they needed more space. …

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The longest-serving members of the city councils for Lakewood and University Place also are the mayors for their respective cities.

The Lakewood City Council returned Doug Richardson to the mayor’s seat for a third consecutive two-year term with a unanimous vote Tuesday night. At about the same time, the University Place City Council selected Ken Grassi to serve as mayor for a second time. Voters elected both men to their respective councils before the cities of Lakewood and University Place incorporated in the mid-1990s.

The mayor is a mainly a figurehead in Lakewood’s and University Place’s council-manager form of government. …

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The ongoing controversy over the efforts by the Washington Military Department to move Camp Murray’s main gate deeper into the Tillicum neighborhood was voted the top news story of the year in West Pierce County.

Although I was hoping to see a lot more votes, the Camp Murray gate story was voted tops by an overwhelming margin.

David Anderson, president of the Tillicum-Woodbrook Neighborhood Association, had put out a request for residents in the neighborhood and others to cast their votes for the story.

The extension of sanitary sewer into Tillicum and Woodbrook took the No. 2 spot.

Efforts to …

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A story on the Wall Street Journal’s website this morning highlights University Place as a poster child for municipal financial meltdowns nationwide.

Long a model American community with high-performing schools, beautiful parks and rising real estate values, this city of 31,000 on the Puget Sound has lately turned into a reluctant showcase for the downgrading of America.

It was in the midst of building a new downtown virtually from scratch when the financial crisis set in three years ago, leaving the city with a big debt and little of the new tax revenue it expected by now.

So, University

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The city of University Place announced Friday that its credit rating has been downgraded.

Moody’s, one of the three major credit rating agencies, cited the city’s high debt burden and diminished ability to meet those obligations in lowering the rating to A2 from A1.

Moody’s A investment grade are obligations of “upper-medium grade” subject to low credit risk. It also gave the city a negative outlook, meaning there’s a risk of another downgrade over the next 18 months.

Although lower, Eric Faison, assistant city manager of administrative services, said the new rating is still a good one.

“I can’t emphasize …

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The University Place Police Department finished moving into the civic and library building this week.

The department had shared space with University Place Fire Department, now West Pierce Fire and Rescue, in the old public safety building across Drexler Drive. The building opened in April 2002.

The fire department had wanted more space in anticipation of the voter-approved merger of Lakewood and University Place fire departments into West Pierce, which began operations earlier this year.

The department had built the building, and city made debt payments so the department could use 3,200 square feet within. In 2009, the fire department …

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