Total cost of new Lacey police station estimated at $61.5M. How will city pay for it?
Lacey City Council on Thursday heard an update on the new police station the city wants to build between Interstate 5 and City Hall on College Street Southeast. And the cost estimate is going up.
On Thursday, council members received a design stage update that showed a range of total construction costs of between $53 million and $56 million. Tack on the cost of the land and the estimated total rises to $61.5 million, according to Finance Director Troy Woo.
Why does the city need a new police station? The current one, which is attached to City Hall, has run out of room.
Still, council members have pushed to reduce the size of the new building to control costs. It was originally pitched to be a 50,000-square-foot building, then was requested to be downsized to about 43,000 square feet.
Bill Valdez, KMB Architects partner and principal on the project, said he wasn’t able to get the building down to 43,000 square feet, but did shrink it to 46,000 square feet.
Police Chief Robert Almada told the council that a conference room has been removed, the size of an investigation room was reduced, and intensive tactics training will no longer have its own space, but will take place in the gym.
“It’s not ideal, but it will work,” he said.
One area of the new building that could not be sacrificed was the size of the evidence holding room, Almada said.
Lacey is the largest city in the county and is likely to stay that way, so the city is going to attract more crime, Almada said. Criminal cases are taking more time and evidence retention is needed longer, he said.
“There has to be additional capacity to be prepared for that,” he said.
The other part of the cost equation: The construction industry is facing what Principal Valdez referred to as “hyper-escalating costs” since the end of the pandemic. Initially those costs, driven higher by supply chain problems, were rising 10 percent a quarter. The rate of increase isn’t that high now, but construction costs are still rising 5-6 percent a year, he said.
Council member Lenny Greenstein questioned if it even makes sense to shoot for a smaller building if the police department has to expand in the future at a greater cost.
“This should be a 20-25 year building with no expansion,” Chief Almada said.
After the council heard the estimates, Finance Director Woo’s explained the payment plan.
Despite the rising costs, the city remains set on paying for the building without going to voters to ask for a property tax increase to fund bonds.
Instead, the city’s plan is to use a combination of bonds, real estate excise taxes, federal COVID-19 relief funds and reserves to pay for the project. That has been the city’s plan all along, although at the $61.5 million level, the city will draw more heavily on general fund reserves, Woo said.
Construction of the new police station is expected to begin the first quarter of 2024 and last 20 months.
This story was originally published April 28, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
