BPS eying new impound lot, operations building

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This article was published 20/01/2024 (970 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon Police Service is looking to expand in 2024 by developing a new impound lot and finding a secondary headquarters, the acting chief and acting deputy chief told Brandon City Council during a special meeting on Thursday evening.

Acting Chief Randy Lewis said an additional $2.24 million in funding for BPS promised by the previous provincial government in July 2023 arrived too late in the year to spend it.

From those funds, $300,000 was put aside to help pay for a new vehicle impound lot, $320,000 has been earmarked to purchase body-worn cameras and $1.2 million has been put aside for the service to purchase an additional building.

Acting deputy chief Greg Hebert said when the city was looking to build the current BPS headquarters on Victoria Avenue, bids for the initial tender all came back over budget, and the scope of the project had to be reduced.

When the service moved into that building, it had around 115 staff. This year, the service’s workforce is expected to swell to around 175 people, which is causing some space constraints. Hebert said all four of the officers in the traffic department, for example, share a space intended only for a single person.

Leasing, rather than buying a space, would be a challenge because the building would need extra security as it likely would not meet security standards.

Newer, larger headquarters would cost around $50 million to $75 million to build. That, Hebert said, is why BPS is looking to buy a second building.

“It would be an operations centre that would not be public-facing,” he said. “It would be an office/warehouse space that would allow us to grow and consolidate our people and equipment under one roof. Meetings, interviews, etc., would take place in our current headquarters.”

Hebert said the city has a budget of around $5 million and is looking for a space of around 30,000 square feet, but he said finding something that met the service’s needs was posing a challenge until Thursday morning when a large building up for sale was identified.

Discussing the finances surrounding the second building, Lewis said on top of the $1.2 million set aside from the provincial funding, BPS also has another $300,000 earmarked for the purchase in the 2024 budget, $1.5 million in the 2026 budget and a further $300,000 per year added to the budget going forward to pay debts associated with the purchase.

Something that could make the purchase easier, Lewis said, is a potential partnership with the RCMP for an as-yet unannounced joint unit between the Mounties and BPS that will require office space in Brandon.

“The RCMP are in charge of finding that space and we’re working with them on that,” Lewis said. “I did have a conversation with our counterpart who’s head of the project for the RCMP and there’d be a very good chance that part of the building we just became aware of this morning would be leased from us.”

In an email, RCMP media relations officer Tara Seel said that while the Mounties are always open to working with partners in innovative ways, “there is no information to provide in regards to an integrated unit with Brandon Police Service.”

According to Hebert, BPS impounds around 150 vehicles every year at a charge of around $700 per instance.

He said there had been previous discussion about purchasing an impound lot because those services are currently done by a third party that collects all the towing fees. With the extra provincial funding, the thought was to use it to move services in-house.

“Having ability to have our own impound lot would see some revenues for the city in and around $100,000 per year,” Hebert said. “I’ve had some preliminary conversations with some people from the city and one of the areas we’re looking at is the old landfill site over on 17th Street East.”

The challenge with that site is that it is not currently serviced by utilities, it would need to be graded and a security fence would have to be installed.

While it’s hard to determine the cost of extending infrastructure to the site right now, Hebert said the day-to-day operation costs would be minimal once it is set up.

On the body-worn cameras, Lewis said $80,000 had initially been put aside to purchase them in the 2019 capital budget. That purchase was never made because it was not enough to cover the entire cost and those funds have been carried forward to the present.

“Currently the Province of Manitoba has a digital evidence management system trial going on right now and once that trial is completed in the late summer, we are in a position where we could use that $400,000 to purchase a body-worn camera system compatible with that digital management system,” Lewis said.

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