New Bedford working towards building new police headquarters

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. (WLNE) — Officials in New Bedford are taking the first steps in what’s expected to be a long journey, announcing plans to build a new police headquarters in the Whaling City.

Members of the police department said that the Rockdale Avenue office was never meant to be a permanent solution, being built on the bones of a supermarket.

“Twenty-four years ago, they hastily kicked us out of Spring Street and told us they’d be moving us up to Rockdale Avenue temporarily,” Chief Pail Oliveira said. “It was only going to be a quick fix and they would be building us a new state-of-the-art facility. And needless to say, here we are.”

The interior of the office still has the fluorescent lights and areas hosting the original tile flooring.

“We don’t even have any temporary holding facilities here, holding cells that meet the standards, so we cannot even place someone temporarily in a cell here in this building,” Oliveira said.

When officers moved into the building back in 1999, it was already clear they would need to build a new location to house the growing police force, but in order to make that step, Mayor Jon Mitchell said there was a lot of catch-up on other issues in the city.

“We’ve been playing catch-up on public infrastructure, roads, public buildings all over the place,” the mayor said. “But before I got into office the city didn’t have a capital plan. We had to put all that together, it didn’t have a Chief Financial Officer, so we’ve had to put all these financial structures in place in city government before we could start to pay our bills in a routine way and to plan for big projects like this.”

Mitchell estimated it could be a three-or-four year project, costing nearly $100 million, if not more.

However there is no estimate on how early in the process the city is in.

“Guess what, it’s not going to get any cheaper, we know that right?” Oliveira said. “It’s inevitable we need a new police headquarters. So if we don’t do it now, it will only cost more and more and more to put this off so.”

The chief said they had heard plans to rebuild before but its never made it to this stage so he’s feeling slightly more confident moving forward.

There is no location picked out, and work will continue out of the Rockdale Avenue station for the foreseeable future.