Touring The Police Facility On Balmoral Street

The building is 30 years old.

Major components of it came from the original location on Donald Street, those are more than 40 years old.

During a tour with the media Friday, Chief Sylvie Hauth indicated that there’s only one board room. It gets used for a multitude of things; including classes for training, meetings, as well as physical training sessions where desks and chairs are removed and padded mats get put down instead.

What the Chief indicates is that there is no functionality to the space for 21st century use.

Key roles often have to split their time between two spaces that are on opposites sides of the building.

Not to mention the capacity limitations for staff. What were offices originally designed for only a couple of people, now house more than six and many are spilling into hallways and taking over closets that get retrofitted to be an office space.

This is also limited to the fact that the building is made up of concrete blocks which makes it difficult to renovate by moving walls, or to even run new cabling through them for upgraded IT needs.

In a showing of one of the prisoner blocks, the doors are the sliding bars that are only accessed by a key. So in the even of an emergency, the special constable on duty would need to manually open or close each door thus wasting valuable time for everyone’s safety. The standard now for prison cells is there is a privacy screen in each cell to allow the person in custody some human decency when using the toilet. When the cells are viewed in person, there is no where to place those, thus the lack of privacy in an already stressful situation compounds.

When speaking to Acadia News, the Chief indicated that there were three options explored;

1. Basic upgrades to meet code for the building structure only ($10 million)
2. Renovation and building add-ons to the current building only ($64 million)
3. New building; new location, new facility entirely ($56 million)

The Chief is also holding tours for each council member to come and have a look at the facility for themselves, so far she’s shown the disrepair of the building to half of City Council.

You can read about the possible plans here the police’s website.