More than three months after officers and staff transferred to the new facility, East Peoria hosted community members Friday for an official grand opening of the police department’s spacious new headquarters on Camp Street.
“This building is going to reflect the professionalism of our department, so that part’s really exciting,” said Chief David Catton. “We’re really excited about the opportunity to open it to the community, so they can come in and see exactly what we’ll be operating under.”
Following a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Catton and other department leaders offered guided tours of the new 37,000-square-foot building that’s more than six times larger than the previous police department space.
“The old building was about 24,000 square feet. We occupied about six [thousand], but we shared the rest of it with the fire department,” said Catton. “So it’s quite a big upgrade, but everything is purpose-built. Everything has a purpose, and everything is used for a purpose.”
Mayor John Kahl said the full project from design and engineering to construction cost about $24 million, coming in under budget and ahead of schedule. He said it exemplifies the city’s commitment to public safety.
“It’s a sense of community pride here, and I think once people walk through it, they can see why we’re so pleased with the results,” said Kahl. “A lot of effort went into the design, the planning, the construction side of it.
“To learn to appreciate what we have today, you really had to see what they worked out of for a long time. You know, they outgrew that space a number of years ago, a couple decades ago. With the size of the department we have, and all the requirements between the training, the records, retention, evidence, and everything, this space meets all those needs and then some.”
The new building includes office areas, workout and training spaces, holding cells, an evidence lab and approximately 2,000 square feet of evidence storage space – which wasn’t available at the former location. There’s also a community room for public meetings, programs, gatherings and events.
“Obviously, now we don’t have any excuses for why we can’t do some things because now we have the space to be able to do it,” said Catton. “It also provides an opportunity to be more efficient with all of our processes and actually be able to offer more things for the community.”
Kahl said the new police department building represents a worthy use of taxpayer dollars and exemplifies the city’s continued commitment to public safety.
“This city council has been very lockstep in its investment in public safety over the last 7½ years, and this is a testament to that,” said Kahl. “We saw the need; I mean, the need’s been there for a long time. It was an easy decision to make.”
Catton said the department is currently fully staffed with 50 officers, and the transition into the new facility gone as well as could be expected.
“It’s been pretty smooth, for the most part. Once you get in here and really understand that when you have a space designed to do exactly what it is, and you’re not sharing multiple spaces, and you know where everything is that you put into the new space, you’re kind of grateful,” he said.
“Obviously, the room we’re standing in now, we can actually fit our whole entire department in here and actually have other people fill the space as well. But we never had that before. We couldn’t have an entire department meeting, because we could we didn’t have the space to put everybody.”
