New police/fire station: security, space, tech

TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
A timeline released by the city on Monday estimates that the current public safety building could be out of commission by summer 2020. The draft schedule shows the city plans to open the project to bidding in April, followed by a yearlong construction process after bid approval.

With voter approval of a 20-year extension for the City of Maryville’s half-cent capital improvement sales tax by more than a two-to-one margin in Tuesday’s municipal election, the stage is set for construction of a new Maryville Public Safety police/fire facility.

While a few floor plans and schematics exist for the proposed new headquarters, planning is still very much in the preliminary stage.

On Wednesday, however, Public Safety Director Keith Wood said a number of priorities for the facility have emerged, the most important being security.

“I think that would be my main priority and goal,” Wood said, “to better manage what comes in and out our front door.”

Minimally secure access to Public Safety’s dispatch and 911 communications center has long been an issue at the station, where dispatchers — and their battery of computers and radios — are separated from the public by nothing more than a glass window just inside the headquarters’ main entrance.

The narrow entryway is separated from the rest of the building by an ordinary door equipped with a buzzer lock that opens into an equally cramped service counter area. After that, a waist-high swinging partition is the sole barrier an intruder would face in seeking to gain further access.

While the arrangement doesn’t cause much of a problem in the course of a routine day, police days — and more specifically police nights — are often far from routine.

Following an arrest or disturbance, Wood has said, the police station entrance can become crowded and confused with officers, victims, suspects and witnesses all in close proximity.

This obviously creates a security problem, but it also illustrates why Wood’s second major goal for a new station is simply more space, and specifically more space in the form of a suite of interview and processing rooms that would allow officers to “move people around internally that you may not want to be in contact with one another.”

Currently interviews and interrogations are held in a single, small office just a few yards from the service counter. At a new station, Wood said he envisions “a small network” of such spaces that can be securely entered and exited, along with an observation room where police can observe interrogations without being heard or seen.

But detailed plans for all of that will come later, Wood said, because the first thing that has to happen on the road toward a new Public Safety building is a decision on where to build it.

The director said he expects to meet with other city officials, possibly early next week, to discuss a construction timeline with “land acquisition at or near the top of the list.”

While it might seem there are any number of construction sites available in Maryville, the choices are not as plentiful as one would think. For one thing, both Wood and City Manager Greg McDanel have already expressed a preference for keeping the police and fire station downtown.

But given the space requirements of a modern police department — and even greater needs posed by the fire protection division related to trucks, turnout gear, equipment storage and training — options within the central business district are limited.

Wood said one possibility under consideration is the headquarters’ current location on Vine Street between Second and Third, a choice that would likely incorporate an existing parking lot into the new building’s footprint and possibly divide Vine in two.

In addition to the present location, Wood said the city is looking at three or four other sites, all of them in the central part of town.

After location, security and size, the director said a fourth priority for a new headquarters will be an expanded capacity for digital technology.

Among other tech challenges, video capability has become a major issue for law enforcement in recent years, and is creating new demands on both Maryville Public Safety and the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Office.

Sheriff Randy Strong said Wednesday that his staff is being taxed to fulfill discovery requests for video from defense attorneys covering all aspects of a suspect’s incarceration, including booking, interviewing, breathalyzer testing and other procedures.

Strong said the Sheriff’s Office is spending $2,000 for a used video system that will allow jail personnel to quickly and accurately pinpoint specific video segments and download them onto DVDs or other media as requested by the courts.

The volume of requests for such video, he said, has grown to the point where meeting the demand is almost a full-time job.

Wood said the rising number of attorney requests for law enforcement video is an issue for local police as well, and that a new station will need to be equipped to handle those requirements.

One of the challenges, he said, is putting the staff and technology in place to efficiently assemble video from multiple sources, including body cameras worn by officers, dash cameras installed in patrol vehicles and video monitors used to record interactions within the police station itself.