Township police space needs talks continue

By Dana Casadei 

The Bloomfield Township Board of Trustees met with James Gallagher, Bloomfield Township Police Chief, for the third time to discuss the police department’s space needs at their meeting on Monday, April 28.

The department’s space needs were originally brought up at the meeting on March 23, then again at the April 13 meeting. 

The main reason Gallagher was back before the board at Monday’s night meeting was to discuss the recent conversations they have had with the RedStone firm about the Bloomfield Township court building and if that was also an aging infrastructure. 

RedStone did the original police department space needs analysis and proposed a new layout that would include dedicated training rooms, defensive tactic rooms, simulator rooms, different holding areas, and an actual community room.

“Unfortunately, one of the things that we determined during that discussion was that the court needs more space than we anticipated initially,” Gallagher said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty with the court right now and how many judges will be there in the future. There are some infrastructure things there that I don’t think are really something that can be committed to at this time.”

The idea of using shared space among the existing township buildings had been brought up at the April 13 meeting by trustee Mark Antakli, and in doing that research, Gallagher and team determined there really isn’t a lot that can be shared, with one reason being the optics and wanting to keep the court systems and the enforcement systems separate, the other being the sheer amount of space both groups need. 

“My recommendation to you as we move forward is to hopefully figure out a way to get us a new building,” Gallagher said. “This building cannot, and will not, based on the recommendations handle anymore remodels or additions to it. If we start tearing down walls… we may end up with some significant structural problems.”

One of the buildings the police department is 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. 

“It seems like we’re disjointed because different things are in different places,” said trustee Valerie Murray, who recently did a tour of the police department with Gallagher. “You need to have your department together.”

The police chief also noted that the department needs to be able to work with other municipalities when the chance comes up. 

“This is what drew us to this issue about a year ago. We had an agency reach out to us with an ask if we could provide dispatch services to them and we weren’t able to provide that,” Gallagher said.

At the March 23 board of trustees meeting the police chief reminded the board that 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. According to the space needs assessment conducted by RedStone, a police department of Bloomfield Township’s size should operate across 58,000-60,000 square feet to be the most efficient, including hallways and stairwells, and would put operation space at about 45,000-square-feet. 

“I’m not so worried about the size of the new building, but of the limitations we have in our current space now,” Gallagher said. “When we’re trying to modernize and build a police department that’s going to be beneficial now and into the future, how do we do that for another 100 years?”


The police department has 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, the police chief noted.


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, a conference room was converted to operational use, the patrol workshop was converted into a locker room with no bathrooms, and the administrative space was reduced, the chief said.


Other updates that will be needed 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. It has become pretty much useless during the day shift now that the police department is aware of the noise issue with DPW. Although they have made some modifications to be able to do training at the range. 


There are also vital 911 vulnerabilities with their current set-up, Gallagher said. Critical 911 equipment is housed in the penthouse, an area that is not designed for the environmental controls required by modern technology. According to the chief, the building has fire alarms but no fire sprinklers, and has limited ADA accessibility.


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


Gallagher said as they were talking through this space need with RedStone that the annex – the land that the township owns on Golf Drive which the fire department currently uses for training – was brought up as a potential option. The hope would be to use the annex to build a range with a storage facility as well, and Gallagher said that the fire department would benefit from that too.


The idea of building an off-site, specialized, dedicated training facility at the annex would include a state-of-the-art range, training rooms, defense and tactic rooms, everything they would need to train and work with officers. This space would remove some of the square feet that the police department would need on the township’s campus.


“We are limited in space on the campus that we have. So, 60,000-square-feet is ideal, but that doesn’t include a range, that doesn’t include secure parking, which we don’t have now,” Gallagher said. “RedStone brought that idea to us… an off-site training facility.”


This would allow for training to take place all in once space, which it does not currently.


Trustee Chris Kolinski also noted that sometimes it’s cheaper to build something off-site when looking at the costs to modernize and bring things up to current standards. He said that he believes that’s what the township is looking at here – that it will be more fiscally responsible to build off-site.


“It’s just, how do we fund it? And how do we get you there?” Kolinski said. 


While a project such as this would take years to complete, Gallagher encouraged that steps start being taken sooner rather than later for a multitude of reasons, one of the largest being cost. 


He said if they had done this years ago when it was originally discussed it probably would have saved the township millions of dollars.


“We’re a community that deserves a modern facility,” Gallagher said. “I give great credit to those who take care of our buildings, the building has been well maintained, but we’ve outgrown it. This isn’t a wish, it’s a need.”