Get Out Your Check Books Folks And Let The Tens-Of-Millions Of Dollars Flow For A New Regional Police Headquarters

By Doug Draper

Whether all those Niagara, Ontario residents who have questioned the need for a new police headquarters like it or not, regional councillors are moving forward with plans to build one, for a cost totally tens-of-millions of dollars, in Niagara Falls.

This regional police headquarters in downtown St. Catharines will be demolished.

At a committee-of-the-whole meeting this April 7, a majority of the directly elected representatives and local mayors sitting on the council voted in favour of plans to build the Niagara Falls headquarters and a new district office for the Niagara Regional police in St. Catharines for a total cost of $83 million.

One of the few objectors – St. Catharines Mayor Brian McMullan – put up a vigorous fight over the past few years to keep the headquarters for the NRP in the downtown of his city, where it has been located for more than 40 years. McMullan was visibly upset at the April 7 meeting to learn that the cost of the new headquarters has jumped up from about $300 to $370 per square foot and that there is no longer any reason to believe that the local office of the RCMP and federally operated Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) may not be sharing the facilities.

The appointed board for the Niagara Regional Police based some of their pitch for moving the headquarters for the NRP to Niagara Falls on the possibility of sharing facilities and services with the RCMP, CBSA and perhaps even the OPP, which occupies a building off Hwy. 420 and Stanley Avenue and only a few blocks away from where the NRP headquarters will go.

This part of the Niagara Regional Headquarters in St. Catharines will be vacated.

Questioned by Niagara-on-the-Lake Lord Mayor Dave Eke and St. Catharines regional councillor Andy Petrowski about the suitability of the headquarters the NRP occupies now, consultant Dean Roberts, whose firm MWL Architects ha worked on several police buildings in other regions, said the main headquarters on St. Catharines’ King Street is “unquestionably inefficient and out of date.”

So a majority of directly elected councillors and local mayors sitting on the regional council voted in favour of the plans for the new headquarters, which could be built and ready for occupation in Niagara Falls by mid-2014. They also voted in favour of demolishing the King Street headquarters and using the property to build a district office for the NRP and a parking lot. Another NRP office on James Street in St. Catharines will be abandoned by the police and possibly declared surplus by the regional government.

All of this for $83 million, a price-tag that is apparently capped, although McMullan said staff have advised him that the true cost could amount to something more like $170 million mortgaged over the next 30 or so years – meaning future generations are going to be paying for all of this, rightly or wrongly.

What may be interesting to consider is where else this police headquarters may have gone in the region. If not leave it in downtown St. Catharines, which might have been a perfectly good idea from a let’s-sustain-our-downtowns view, why not Welland, for example. Relatively speaking, Welland’s downtown area has gone through some of the worst of times and there is plenty of room (they call it brownfield space) off East Main Street where the old Atlas Steels plant was. That site is also close to Hwy. 406 and is located just about smack dap in the middle of the region.

Think about what putting a new central police headquarters for our regional police at that site might have done for access to that facility for the whole region and for a downtown area that is struggling to get back. But there is not a hair of evidence that any of our municipal leaders across this region ever thought of that.

So here we are with this 83 to170 million dollar business. Get ready to dig a little deeper into your pockets folks.

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