Cape Town - The City of Cape Town is looking to spend up to R350 million on building a new Safety and Security Policing Training College on the site of the abandoned GF Jooste Hospital.
The plans for the college were revealed exclusively to the Cape Argus on Monday.
The mayco member for safety and security, JP Smith, unveiled the plans on Monday.
The planned training college would house metro police trainees, metro and regional law enforcement officers, cadets and youth academy camps on its 4.5 hectare plot.
The building would take an estimated two to three years to complete and would cost between R280m and R350m.
Once complete, it would have two football fields, two swimming pools, accommodation, a recreational block, lecture rooms, an examination hall, a gymnasium, a vehicle testing facility, K53 testing facility and an indoor shooting range.
Although the city and the Department of Public Works are still in “strong discussions” about the site’s fate, Smith’s deputy, Yolanda Fanoe, said the department had given the city the go-ahead to lease the building on a monthly basis.
Smith pointed out that the city would take on the added cost of repairing the damage to the abandoned building that were looted by vandals.
“I estimate it to be over R50m to restore basic functionality to the building. It will take about three to five years,” he said.
Once the building is acquired, the Observatory training centre in Rochester Road would be converted into a deployment centre. The 200 basic trainees and the more than 100 metro police officers and staff members would be relocated to the new facility in Manenberg.
Smith said the labour to build the facility would be sourced from surrounding areas including, but not limited to Gugulethu, Philippi, Hanover Park and Manenberg.
Fanoe said the city would save more than R2.5m annually. “This means the safety and security sector would be able to recoup the cost of the building in about 15 years.”
She said the city had previously outsourced facilities to conduct basic training which “always costs an arm and a leg”.
“It would be a one-stop shop for basic trainees. We would not have to outsource other facilities that cost us over R30 000 a person to accommodate,” she said.
The committee said it would also be running youth-at-risk programmes with the Department of Education.
“What is important to me is saving our youth. We want to show them that instead of becoming gangsters, drug addicts or becoming a teenage parent, they do have a future,” Fanoe said.
Mayor Patricia de Lille was due to brief the media on the plans for the GF Jooste site on Wednesday.
She said that the building of a metro police training centre has yet to be approved and is in the “infancy stages”.
Cape Argus