BCPD makes pitch for new HQ

During Tuesday’s Boulder City Council meeting, BCPD Deputy Chief Aaron Johnson shared a very eye-opening photo.

“I don’t know if you guys are aware of this, but that building across the street is just about 100 years old,” he said.

Johnson showed a 1930s-era photo of the building and noted that at the time the picture was taken, the building housed the offices of the city manager, the city clerk, public works and the police department.

“You’ll see things in that building that really belong in a museum and not in a police department anymore,” he said, and said confidently that the building is “absolutely inadequate for a police department.”

His presentation included pictures of estimates for the construction of a new building from 1975. Johnson said that in that year, a study was done that found the building to be inadequate. That was almost 50 years ago.

The study from 1975 proposed putting a new nearly 10,000-square-foot building in the area of Buchanan and Adams at a cost of about a half million dollars.

He said that when the department’s in-house historian joined the force 25 years ago, he was told that the would be constructing a new building to house the PD.

“We have been chasing this dream for quite some time,” he said.

A second study was done in 2019 by Las Vegas-based engineering firm Stantec. The study found that, while the building was in good condition structurally, its “use as a public safety building ranks it in the poor category.”

The study also noted that the building is not compliant with federal public access laws, and was nearly 50% smaller than it needs to be in order to meet national standards for public safety facilities.

Johnson continued, noting that, because the prisoner holding area is so far from meeting federal standards, that the department is currently in talks with Henderson to come to an arrangement in which people arrested in Boulder City will go directly the the Henderson City Jail.

“One of the things I am really excited to champion over the next 10 years, because I know it’s not happening tomorrow, but I will continue to bring up to the community that our needs have been identified since 1975. It has not changed since. We have been doing more with less for a very, very long time. It’s time for the city to essentially modernize our police department and do more than just paint the interior, give it a facelift and put some new walls up and say ‘This is adequate.’”

When asked if they had any questions, no one on the council responded.

Earlier in the presentation, Boulder City Police Chief Tim Shea gave a rundown of crime statistics, noting that, while crime in BC continues to be much lower than other cities in the state, some categories, including aggravated assault and sex crimes involving adults were way up, something he attributed largely to better capturing of data.

Shea also noted a general historical trend downward for many property crimes. For example, in 2012, there were 94 burglaries in BC versus just 32 in both 2022 and 2023.

As this was a presentation and not a proposal that required action by the council, no vote was taken and no further action was discussed.