A year after City Council voted to give the police sex-crimes unit a state-of-the-art headquarters, rape victims still must face being interviewed inside the squad's run-down offices on a former military base ringed by razor wire.

And investigators are still jammed inside Building 110, behind the walls of the old Frankford Arsenal.

Have patience, say city officials.

City budget officers said last week that unexpectedly tangled negotiations over insurance at the new facility, among other issues, are close to being resolved.

Rick Tustin, director of the city's Capital Program Office, said he expected that the city soon would finally sign a lease to permit the squad to move to a building on the grounds of Episcopal Hospital in North Philadelphia.

Tustin said negotiators for Episcopal and the city recently resolved most key issues. A final agreement is being drafted for signatures, he said.

"They literally finished this," Tustin said. "Now it's an issue of getting the documents in both hands."

The delay has angered women's organizations waiting to open offices at Episcopal, along with police, to provide one-stop assistance to sexual-assault victims.

"We were hoping to lease space to put our intervention folks up there," said Carole Johnson, director of the Philadelphia chapter of Women Organized Against Rape. "We can't negotiate any space. There's no reason for us to be there if the police are not there."

Carol Tracy, head of Philadelphia's Women's Law Project, a nonprofit group that monitors police response to sex crimes, said the failure to move was an insult to the police who work in the Special Victims Unit.

"They're really demoralized," Tracy said. "It's not fair, and it's not acceptable."

In a series of articles published in 1999, The Inquirer reported that the police rape squad had for two decades secretly rejected thousands of complaints from women. Investigators labeled victims as liars or improperly concluded that evidence was unclear as to whether any crime had taken place.

The articles also spotlighted the city's long-term practice of relegating the rape squad to backwater offices.

In the 1980s, the unit was housed in a crumbling former schoolhouse in Port Richmond until that site was abandoned because of asbestos contamination. The unit was housed until the mid-1990s in a former park-police station in South Philadelphia that reeked of horse manure.

Since then, the unit had been at the arsenal, next to a crematorium. When the unit's air conditioners fail in the summer, as they often do, the windows must be opened and smell wafts in from the neighboring building.

In December 2000, the Street administration told City Council that it was considering moving the headquarters.

Tustin told Council that the squad's arsenal office was in "very poor condition. "It doesn't really meet the needs of how they do their job," he said.

Last June, after Council approved leasing the new facility, city officials said they were ready to spend more than $1 million to renovate space for the squad at Kensington's Episcopal Hospital, operated by Temple University Health Systems.

Officials pledged that the move to Episcopal would be completed last fall.

Then came the roadblocks.

"One of the issues had to do with insurance," said Tustin. "The city is self-insured. We don't take out insurance policies. Most owners are content writing that in the lease. Temple required additional insurance."

Tustin and other officials said they were still unable to say precisely when remodeling at Episcopal might begin.

City Managing Director Estelle Richman met with Episcopal officials this month to finalize what they hope will be the last phase of an agreement.

"There still is no lease," said Andy Smith, a spokesman for Episcopal Hospital. "We are still negotiating with them. We feel we are very close to an agreement."

Johnson, the director of Women Organized Against Rape, said city officials have given her no explanation for the delay.

"I have not a clue," said Johnson. "I heard that things are moving along, and then no one can give me any answers. From my perspectives, it's where it was before."