The Taneytown Police Department will not, after all, move across the street. Neither will city offices.

After conceding that the difficulties outweighed the advantages, the City Council decided to scrap plans to buy a building that was once city hall, said Mayor W. Robert Flickinger.

"Totally been ruled out," Flickinger said. "They would have had to spend $125,000 to renovate that building, and it wasn't handicap-accessible. That's what you have to look at today."

Flickinger said the city has withdrawn the $90,000 bid it had offered on 16-18 E. Baltimore St. He said the objections of many business people along the street also played a large role in influencing officials to cancel the plan.

At a council meeting in February, business owners objected to the city's tentative plan to buy the building to relieve crowding in offices shared by the police and city employees.

The business owners were specific in their objections: The building across the street had no off-street parking, and cruisers would likely take up spaces on the street that customers use. If cruisers and other vehicles were parked in the rear of the building, they would have sight problems pulling out of the side alley onto East Baltimore Street.

Marvin Flickinger, a barber whose shop is a few doors from the former city hall, was among the most vocal opponents of the move to that location. He is a distant relative of the mayor.

"I think they made the right decision," Marvin Flickinger said.

"I think if you go in there with your ducks in a row, they respond to you," he said.

In addition to protesting the proposed move by the Police Department, the barber told the council he had reservations about the building being appropriate for any city use and suggested the offer be withdrawn even if it meant forfeiting the $1,000 deposit.

Mayor Flickinger said there are no definite plans to buy a different building. The city was outbid on a larger, more expensive brick building that the mayor had favored, the former Potomac-Edison building, also called the Fuss building.

However, Marvin Flickinger said he had learned the building was again a possibility. The mayor declined to comment on the status of that building.

"If we had moved city offices there, it would have been beautiful," Mayor Flickinger said. But at more than $200,000, the bids from competing buyers were more than the City Council wanted to spend, he said, although he felt the property was worth the price.

The Fuss building was built by Melvin Fuss for his funeral home and the furniture store he ran on the second floor. It is vacant on the first floor and has apartments on the second floor.

Pub Date: 3/29/99