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Addressing Space Needs Grand Chute Police Department
Over the past several years, the Grand Chute Police Department has grappled with critical space deficiencies in our current facility. These constraints are the direct result of our department's growth. We are immensely thankful for the strong community support of public safety and the commitment to providing the necessary staffing resources to keep Grand Chute safe.
However, as our community has grown, so has our department. The most recent growth followed the passage of the public safety referendum on November 8, 2022, which authorized the hiring of three additional police officers, a patrol supervisor, and an investigator, while converting two part-time support positions into full-time roles. To put this in perspective: when our current facility was designed in 1999, the department consisted of 26 full-time staff and 7.6 full-time equivalent (FTE) part-time employees. Today, we operate with 49 full-time staff and 4.0 FTE part-time employees.
While our staff has nearly doubled, our facility has not. To meet the needs of our growing department, we have employed creative, temporary solutions to provide workspaces. Unfortunately, this has meant converting closets into offices, squeezing staff into shared rooms, bringing in temporary lockers due to locker room capacity issues, borrowing external storage for our incident command and crime scene vehicles, and asking officers to store uniforms and equipment at home. While this shuffling has extended the usability of our facility, it has created less-than-ideal operational impacts.
In addition to staffing increases, the field of policing has significantly evolved over the past 25 years. Tools that we have come to expect in law enforcement today, such as body cameras, tasers, cell phones, safe restraints, shields, and less lethal force options were either non-existent or not widely adopted by the department in 1999. While these tools bring great value to policing, they also require additional storage space. Furthermore, advancements to department operations and programs also have an impact on available space. For example, the department is currently in the process of repurposing one of our last remaining storage closets to house both a behavioral health officer and a mental health co-responder. This storage closet had served as the department’s lactation room, a function that will now be displaced to a location outside the department. While not ideal, we are left with very few options to meet our continued needs.
Residents may be surprised to learn that the department lacks a dedicated training space for our officers. Each officer is required to attend a minimum of 24 hours of continuing education each year to maintain their certification. We are thankful to have a dedicated team of in-house instructors who are certified to teach these continuing education courses. While it is customary for departments to have dedicated training spaces for classroom education, physical skills training, and firearms training, our facility does not provide any of these options. Instead, instructors must empty the tables and chairs from our single conference room to conduct department training. At just over 350 square feet, this room would be a tight fit for even a few officers, yet we use it to accommodate a typical class of 12 to 14 staff members.
Our patrol supervisor’s office faces a similar bottleneck: six patrol lieutenants collectively share a single 290-square-foot office. Furthermore, the room housing the four workstations where patrol officers write reports and review investigative case files measures just 100 square feet. To conceptualize these spaces, consider that a standard parking stall is 162 square feet—meaning four officers are sharing a workspace smaller than a single parking spot. Speaking of parking, we only have the capacity to store about one-third of our fleet inside our garage; the remainder of our vehicles must be kept outside, off-site, or are individually assigned.
A recent space needs analysis conducted by Zimmerman Architectural Studios estimated our actual facility needs at 66,737 gross square feet. Comparatively, our current department measures just 16,682 gross square feet. This immense discrepancy of 50,055 square feet underscores the significance of our current predicament.
While we have explored various options over the years, a compelling new solution has emerged: partnering with the Grand Chute Fire Department on a joint Public Safety Building. This shared facility would address the space constraints of the police department and improve emergency response times for the fire department, thereby creating operational efficiencies and reducing overall costs through economies of scale.
Importantly, this project would also provide vital relief to other town departments. Space shortages are not unique to the police department; Public Works, Information Technology, Finance, and the Municipal Clerk are all facing similar deficits that cannot be resolved within the current Town Hall footprint. A recent space plan demonstrated that the vast majority of the square footage vacated by the police department would be seamlessly utilized by these other departments to resolve their own space crises.
Because the proposed Public Safety Building can only proceed with approval from the electorate, the residents of Grand Chute will ultimately decide the future of this project. It is vital that every resident is fully informed of our operational challenges and the proposed solutions so they can make an educated decision. Over the coming weeks and months, we will provide opportunities for residents to tour our facilities, ask questions, and understand how these critical space needs impact the fulfillment of our mission. |
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