Police department space needs before board

By Dana Casdei

After almost a year with little movement, discussions opened up again at the Bloomfield Township Board of Trustees meeting on Monday, March 23, on police department space needs and to revisit the past space needs assessment. 

Currently, the police department is operating at about 22,00-square-feet across two buildings. The square footage includes not just office space, but hallways and stairways as well. James Gallagher, Bloomfield Township Police Chief, said they have converted every conference room they could into another useful space, and in some cases, conference rooms that were once just for the department are now shared with other departments. There’s also no soft interview rooms or room for two additional cubicles to be added for traffic officers.

Over the last year they’ve had to make some reactive changes instead of more planned growth, such as eliminating the supervisor workplace for dispatch expansion, the traffic unit was displaced by command functions, their conference room was converted to operational use, the patrol workshop was converted into a locker room with no bathrooms, and their administrative space was reduced, the chief said. 

“We are currently, completely, tapped out of space within our agency,” Gallagher said. 

One of the buildings they are currently operating out of was built in 1938 with additions added in the late 1960s and 1990s, and those additions are easy to spot too. Typically anywhere there’s a brick wall – brick that needs to be fixed or replaced – is what used to be an exterior wall, which gives an idea of where the additions were put on. 

The building has a flat roof that the water sits on and, according to Gallagher, the roof was not made for a vertical upgrade, which could have solved some of the space issue. Alterations would also be incredibly costly, he said.

With the police department being an essential facility requirement for the township, to redo or remodel things in the building they are currently in would require certain upgrades that the chief said he doesn’t believe the building could handle.

“We’re trying to do 21st century policing in a 20th century shell,” Gallagher said. 

According to the recent space needs assessment – which was paid for through the ARPA funds Bloomfield Township received –  a police department of Bloomfield Township’s size should operate across 58,000-60,000 square feet to be the most efficient. That space once again includes things like hallways and stairwells. 

Within that space needs assessment they also noted gaps within the building code. The building does not meet the current wind and snow load capacities of the 2015 Michigan Building Code requirements, according to the assessment.

When compared to other local municipal police departments, some who share the space with their fire department, Bloomfield Township was well at the bottom of that list, the chief said.

This has also become a recruiting issue, according to Gallagher. 

“I’m recruiting against White Lake, Northville Township and Royal Oak, who have beautiful, brand new buildings. We all pay about the same… but where am I going? I can go here where they have all these facilities,” Gallagher said.

Over a third of the current police force has been with Bloomfield Township for less than three years, which leads to an increased need for training, something that can’t be done now with the space they have, the chief said. With the state mandated training requirements, Gallagher said that they could be training every day.

The proposed layout Gallagher presented from RedStone, who also did the space needs analysis, included dedicated training rooms, defensive tactic rooms, simulator rooms, different holding areas, and an actual community room. A suggestion to separate people coming into the town hall versus those coming into the police station was made too. 

“We are going to need significant upgrades in the near future,” Gallagher said. “There’s a lot of things here that are going to need to be fixed.”

A few of those updates include their current technology and operations gaps. 

There’s wiring bottlenecking which leaves no more room to run more wires for dispatch, being in two buildings brings limits to their ability to train effectively, and the location of their firing range – where they do shotgun and rifle training – makes it near impossible for the department of public works to work, when a training is happening. But shutting down their firing range for a whole day is an entirely different problem, the chief told the board. 

The police department has vital 911 vulnerabilities in their current set up as well, Gallagher said. Critical 911 equipment is housed in the penthouse, an area that is not designed for the environmental controls required by modern technology. The building also has fire alarms but no fire sprinklers., according to the chief.

“If we have something major up there, a leak or something, we could lose our entire 911 system,” Gallagher said. 

The first step would include authorizing the formal transition from a needs assessment to facility planning, an ask that Gallagher requested the board to authorize.

Moving forward, Gallagher asked authorization to send the space needs assessment to facility planning, and a request to start engaging on how to move forward with the board.

No action was taken at the board of trustees meeting.