The closing of all three Chattanooga police satellite precincts has begun.
The Eastgate precinct on Brainerd Road closed last week. The Southside precinct on West 40th Street near Alton Park will close next week, and the downtown precinct on Walnut Street will close by April 1, officials said.
Chattanooga Police Department Chief Freeman Cooper estimates the city will save $30,000 annually with the closings.
The decision to close them was passed by the City Council as part of the July 2009 budget.
"I had no money in this year's budget for them," Chief Cooper said.
Neither patrol coverage nor response times will be affected by the closings, he said.
"The community thinks that policing changes with the building not being in the community anymore, and that's just not true," Chief Cooper said. "None of that has changed. It's the same officers patrolling the same areas."
The chief said the precincts should have closed sooner, but arranging space at the police department's Amnicola Highway headquarters and resolving logistical concerns at the precincts took longer than expected.
The precincts are smaller substations where police meet to begin their shifts and to write reports at the end of shifts.
But losing the perception of police presence in communities has some worried.
"It's very sad, disheartening to know that, due to finances, these precincts will close," said Cynthia Stanley-Cash, president of the North Brainerd Neighborhood Association.
The precincts are "a great deterrent," she said, comparing the precinct buildings to parked patrol cars that slow speeding drivers.
City Councilman Andraé McGary's district includes the downtown precinct. He said he agrees with Chief Freeman and Mayor Ron Littlefield's previous assessments that the precincts were useful tools, and he understands residents' desire to keep them open.
"My personal feeling is that the police precincts certainly serve a useful function for the community as a quick and ready reference," he said.
Councilman Manny Rico's district covers the Southside precinct, which is in the same building as a city youth recreation center.
He said cutting the precincts was necessary as part of larger budget problems, but he had hoped the Southside precinct could stay open because it's so close to the recreation center.
"You have a lot of kids and activities going on there at night," he said.
The downtown precinct was scheduled to close regardless of changes to precinct policy. The property is owned by Unum, which gave notice to the city more than two years ago that the building needed to be vacated.
Mary Clarke Guenther, a Unum spokeswoman, said the company has not made any "concrete decisions" on the property and that likely would be years away.
Benny Rutherford, a former Bluff View resident whose family owns property in the area, said he wasn't concerned with the downtown precinct closing.
"The police presence probably helps keep the homeless away from this part of town," he said, but property owners in the area would not let that become a problem.
POLICE SATELLITE PRECINCTS
Southside
1151 W. 40th St. (Scheduled to close next week)
Downtown
224 Walnut St. (Scheduled to close before April 1)
Eastgate
5600 Brainerd Road (Closed Jan. 28)
Source: Chattanooga Police Department