The abandoned Gainesville Police Department headquarters was demolished this morning as the first step of the building’s reconstruction process.
The new facility will combine all of the department’s offices on one campus and provide more space for day-to-day operations, GPD spokesman Officer Ben Tobias said. It will be built in the parking lot of the old headquarters, 721 NW Sixth St.
Since 2010, Gainesville Police has worked out of satellite offices scattered throughout the city after the department left the old building because of spacing and age issues, Tobias said.
Gainesville Police originally planned to renovate the former headquarters, he said. However, due to structural issues, planners decided to demolish the building and construct a new one because it would save money.
“You want to talk about people being excited about a building being knocked down,” he said. “It’s real progress that we can see.”
The current campus, at the intersection of Northwest Sixth Street and Northwest Eighth Avenue, consists of Gainesville Police’s administration building, a storage building, an evidence storage facility and the abandoned headquarters, according to building plans presented to the Gainesville City Commission in April.
The new, estimated 49,000-square-foot facility will include a two-story operations building, according to the plans. It will also include a training space, Tobias said.
Administrative staff in the current building will move into the new facility, Tobias said. He said he didn’t know which department divisions will occupy the current administrative building on Northwest Eighth Street. The evidence storage facility will remain where it is.
The $10.9 million project is slated to take about a year, Tobias said. The budget is broken into four parts: $3.9 million from the initial city renovation pledge, $1.5 million from confiscated money, $2 million from a bond and $3.5 million from city reserves.
GPD Chief Tony Jones said the demolition is the official start of the project.
“The entire GPD staff has been waiting for this demolition to start,” he said. “It’s an amazing morale boost for the troops to see some measurable movement in the project.”
Contact Kathryn Varn at kvarn@alligator.org.
Gainesville Police Department Headquarters, 721 NW Sixth St., is scheduled to be demolished at 8:30 a.m. The demolition is the first step in the reconstruction process, which will take about one year to complete, said GPD spokesman Officer Ben Tobias.
