Taxpayers spend hundreds of thousands on Sheriff's wall

Tampa, Florida -- You've heard of the Great Wall of China, now Ybor City has the Great Wall of Gee. The wall and guard house are being erected around the Sheriff's Operation Center in Ybor City. It will come into being after one of the areas most popular and powerful politicians, Sheriff David Gee, invited the Department of Homeland Security to visit the office to make recommendations to protect the facility and employees.

However, when we asked people like Greg Nielsen as he was walking in Ybor City if it is a likely spot for terrorist, he laughed out loud and said no.

But the cost of the wall is no laughing matter. You are paying for it with community investment tax money and after all the bricks are put in place and the concrete is poured, it will cost $675,000. The wall and its cost is something the sheriffs' office had a wall of silence about, as it tried to avoid talking about on camera, until we tracked down the sheriff.

We told the Sheriff that we had been trying, for the past several weeks, to talk to someone about the project and wanted to know if he thought it was a good use of taxpayer money. Gee told us he thinks it is.

However, taxpayers we talked to were appalled by the wall. Rick Hawley says he thinks it is a waste of taxpayer dollars and doesn't agree with it.

While the Sheriff points to the homeland security recommendation that he asked for, Gee also says his employees are at risk from criminals and domestic terrorists.

Gee says there are a lot of problems in Ybor City and there is a lot of infrastructure there. He says it was recommended by homeland security.

And while the Sheriff says there are a lot of problems in Ybor City, just a couple of miles away in downtown Tampa, at Tampa Police Headquarters, there doesn't seem to be a need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax money to erect a wall.

Gee says the Sheriff's Office has a different type of operation than that of the Tampa Police.

But whether the wall is to protect the operation center from Terrorists or some other threat, it doesn't make taxpayers happy.

Nielsen says $600,000 in today's economy sounds like a waste of money to him.

However, the sheriff thinks the six foot wall, which appears easy for a determined terrorist to scale, will keep the operation center safer and is money well spent.