Photo by Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
In one of his final acts as mayor, Alex Wyatt discussed the proposal to build a police substation on the first floor of City Hall, in the southwest corner of the building at the Oct. 13 Homewood City Council meeting. “I think adding a presence is always a good thing in terms of the growth of everything that goes on at night in downtown,” Wyatt said.
The fiscal 2026 Homewood budget includes two projects that have been discussed for years — a police substation downtown and a divergent diamond interchange at Lakeshore Drive and Interstate 65.
“With the police department moving out to West Valley, we felt like there needs to be a presence downtown to provide people with access to the police department in this area,” Mayor Alex Wyatt said. “I think that will provide a way for people to feel that they both see the police more regularly and know where to go to address the police when they need to downtown.
“I think adding a presence is always a good thing in terms of the growth of everything that goes on at night in downtown,” he continued. “The more that grows, I think that's good for the city. We've certainly enjoyed having the new restaurants that have come over the past, say, seven years or so. They've all done really well and been successful. I think they've added a good element to downtown Homewood.”
The police substation will be located on the first floor of City Hall, in the southwest corner of the building. Interim City Manager Glen Adams said the idea had been discussed before but didn’t move forward until now.
“It's not anything that wasn't discussed,” he said. “It was just kind of forgotten that it was discussed because of so many different things that were going on. They basically said that this was an opportunity to bring it up and meet some concerns of the citizens at the same time and solve that equation.”
Adams clarified that the substation will not serve as a second headquarters.
“All an annex really does is create a workplace, start-and-finish point for a team of officers,” Adams said. “There's a footprint coming in and around this entire (downtown) area in a regular flow so they're (officers are) going to be seen on a regular basis. That kind of disappeared when you moved everything over there to the west side of the city. Now it provides that additional support back here.”
The space is currently leased by Auburn Community Church for storage, and the transition will begin when the lease ends in December.
The substation is expected to cost about $50,000.
“We're talking about putting some cubicles in there and a couple drops for computers,” he said. “It's not something that's going to be hugely expensive. We have to create an access point, a separate access point outside.”
The fiscal 2026 budget totals $127 million and places a heavy emphasis on infrastructure spending.
“We're spending more on capital improvements, both in one-time purchases for the departments and for repairing the community's infrastructure, than we have in a long time,” the city manager said. “It's a little bit of everything.”
That includes nearly $2 million for drainage and stormwater prevention projects.
The divergent diamond interchange — known as a DDI — was originally planned for fiscal 2026 but was pulled into the fiscal 2025 budget.
“That was in my original plan (for fiscal 2026) until the DDI came in to last year's budget timeframe,” Adams said. “That's so critical to this community and growing, or continuing to grow, the west side of Homewood. When you have bad traffic interchanges, nobody wants to go to that area. This eliminates ... it probably make it (the interchange) 50% more efficient, which is really good.”
The Lakeshore Drive interchange with Interstate 65 is being redesigned through a contract with the Alabama Department of Transportation.
“It's an 80-20 split,” Adams said. “This has been on the books with the city for more than 14 years. I'll just say there are differences of opinions of how we got to this point 14 years later. I will tell you it's the right thing to have been done.”
Adams said he hopes to have a project timeline in November.
