After a shooting outside city hall last month, calls to relocate the Saratoga Springs Police Department’s headquarters have been renewed.
Last month, a Malta man fired a gun at the basement of city hall. In fact, he was firing at the city’s police station.
The department has been located on the ground floor and basement of the Lake Avenue building for decades. Now city officials are renewing their calls to construct a $24 million station on an adjacent parking lot.
Residents wishing to report crimes must do so in a lobby just steps away from city offices.
Assistant Chief Eric Warfield says that’s unacceptable.
“You know, somebody has to report that they lost their wallet. Not a big deal. They just exchange their information through the window. But I want you to imagine for a second the indignity of having to report that you were raped or something happened to your kid, and you have to tell somebody through a glass window what happened while somebody's walking past you to go pay their water bill. It's just not any way you would ever design a police lobby on purpose,” said Warfield.
Walking through the cramped hallways of the lower levels of city hall, the station’s inadequacies are hard to miss.
Body cameras are stored on a counter just feet away from a photocopy machine, a result, Warfield says, of needing to place mandatory equipment in the station without any space to spare or time to make new space.
“This is not a great place for these. We'd prefer to keep everything all in one spot, like in the roll call room, like I mentioned before they get in here, and they're kind of running all over the station, grabbing different things,” said Warfield.
K-9 training equipment, a drone storage cabinet, and children’s toys fill the hallway that leads to the station’s two interview rooms.
“So what you're looking at is a complete lack of storage space,” said Warfield.
The men’s locker room is cramped now that the department is fully staffed with 80 officers, and it’s located above the building’s septic system.
“We've run out of lockers a long time ago. Pretty much all of the command staff, or people that are not in patrol, just change in their office. If they have one the dispatchers, they kind of come in in uniform, but we're out of locker space. That smell that you're smelling is the way this room smells all the time,” said Warfield.
A $1 million renovation a decade ago was meant to delay the need for any major upgrades.
“We're just always going under some type of repair. It looks nicer than it did, but it's kind of lipstick on a pig,” said Warfield.
The station’s holding cells aren’t any better. There’s only one cell for women. The men’s side has half a dozen six-by-four-foot cells with layers of chipped gray-blue paint.
“These, like I said, date back to the 1930s the only thing that's really changed is the lock mechanism that's on them. You got two wooden boards for a bench and a steel toilet and sink combination,” said Warfield.
Warfield says it’s possible the current setup could delay response times.
Last summer, Chief Tyler McIntosh proposed funding for a new station be included in the city’s capital budget. While that failed to happen, $500,000 was set aside to begin engineering and designing a new headquarters.
Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll says the current shared space also poses insurance risks.
“Our insurance company has suggested that we don’t walk up and down Lake Avenue with prisoners because we have liability for doing that. So, this new police department will have a modern sally port with a bridge that will connect them to court,” said Coll.
113th district state Assemblywoman Carrie Woerner says it’s past time to make the move.
“I think it’s better for everybody who touches the criminal justice system if we do this. So, I have, as part of my requests in the budget this year, I’ve put in a request for $10 million. I don’t know what the disposition of that will be yet but I have asked for that money,” said Woerner.
Coll says while he’s working with state and federal representatives to get funding for the project:
“It’s our facility and the bulk of that cost is going to have to be born by the taxpayers of Saratoga Springs,” said Coll.
58% of the city’s $62.6 million budget is already going to the Public Safety Department.