A big number is on the horizon for Douglas County law enforcement.

In November, Lawrence voters will go to the polls to decide whether to spend about $28 million to build a new police headquarters. Before the end of the year, Douglas County commissioners may hire an architect for what would be a multimillion-dollar expansion of the county’s jail. County officials have been careful not to offer a cost estimate yet, but if a headquarters building costs $28 million, it is a safe bet that a 140-bed expansion of the jail will be significant.

The two projects raise the possibility that Lawrence and Douglas County taxpayers may spend $40 million, $50 million or more on law enforcement buildings in the span of two or three years, although county officials haven’t yet given a timeline for the jail expansion.

It seems unlikely, though, that the city and county will combine the projects in an effort to gain economies of scale or other cost savings. City and county leaders said this week they think the two projects are just different enough that a joint project, or even coordinating the construction of the two projects, wouldn’t produce much benefit.

“If I thought there were any efficiencies to be gained from a joint project, I promise you I would be advocating for it,” said Douglas County Administrator Craig Weinaug, who was involved in consolidating the Lawrence fire department and the Douglas County ambulance service into one agency in the 1990s. “But I just don’t see it in this case.”

In the center

The Douglas County Jail is on the eastern edge of Lawrence, near the Kansas Highway 10 and Franklin Road intersection. Moving the jail has not been up for debate. But over the past several months, city commissioners debated where to locate the a new police headquarters.

City and county officials this week said they didn’t give much consideration to locating the police headquarters on county-owned property adjacent to the jail. The jail sits on 17 acres that is only partially developed. City officials said a prime reason the site didn’t get more consideration is they didn’t like its eastern location.

The city did formally consider two sites near the jail: a privately owned piece of ground east of 23rd and O’Connell and a city-owned site in Lawrence Venture Park, across the highway from the jail.

Instead, the city has signed a letter of intent to purchase 47 acres near the McDonald Drive interchange of the Kansas Turnpike for $2.25 million. It plans to use about 15 acres for the police headquarters and seek to redevelop the rest.

Location was the key factor in the site’s selection, officials said. McDonald Drive, which turns into Iowa Street to the south, is much closer to the east-west center of the city than the jail site or the other sites studied.

Having the headquarters near the east-west centerline is of paramount importance because it will cut down on the time patrol officers must drive each day to get from their headquarters to their patrol districts, which basically divide the city into northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest quadrants.

“The central location is the overriding factor from staff’s analysis,” City Manager David Corliss said.

On most days, the location of the police headquarters is not likely to impact response times on individual calls, officials said, because officers often respond from their vehicles that are already out in the community. Police Chief Tarik Khatib said there are a half-dozen times a year or more when an incident such as a bank robbery, a stand-off or other intense situation calls for a large response of officers from the headquarters. In addition, the headquarters would serve as the home for the department’s SWAT vehicle and other tactical equipment that at times needs to be deployed quickly.

Khatib said there is another reason he prefers the McDonald Drive site to one closer to the jail: 23rd Street. The completion of the South Lawrence Trafficway is expected to improve access to the area near the jail, but Khatib said 23rd Street likely would be a major route for officers and the public to access the headquarters.

“I’ve lived here 29 years, and I’ve never found 23rd Street to be a fast way to get anywhere,” Khatib said.

A jail neighbor

What is harder to quantify, city officials said, is how much benefit the police headquarters would get from being adjacent to the jail. City officials conceded there might be some. Officers frequently take suspects to the jail. In some cases, the officers also have physical evidence associated with the arrest that must be logged into the department’s evidence department. Under the proposed plan, officers will have to drive across town from the jail to the headquarters building at McDonald Drive to process the evidence. Having the headquarters building next to the jail would reduce the time involved with that process.

“But that is only one example of what we do,” Khatib said. “That can’t be the determining factor in where the location should be.”

Officers also spend a significant amount of time at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, interviewing victims, suspects and others who have been taken to the hospital. The McDonald Drive site is closer to LMH than any of the other sites studied.

Other locations that officers visit frequently include Municipal Court and Douglas County District Court, which are both downtown. Currently, patrol officers have their offices downtown adjacent to the District Court and just down the block from the Municipal Court. Under the proposed plan, patrol officers will have their offices farther away from District Court, Municipal Court and the jail than they do today. Detectives and police administration, which are housed in a west Lawrence building, will be closer to those facilities than they are today.

Statistics weren’t immediately available on how often patrol officers must travel to the various locations, and Khatib said it can be tough to quantify. He said it’s tough to predict where officers may need to be at any given time, which he said is another reason for having a facility near the center of town.

“Being in the center of town is a way to hedge our bets,” Khatib said.

The city’s selection of the McDonald Drive site for the headquarters has drawn some public criticism, in part because it was the most expensive of the sites considered and the city bypassed sites that it already owned.

Khatib said he hopes the public still remembers the main reason for the facility — to bring the city’s patrol division, detectives, administration, evidence storage and other functions under one roof. Currently, the department is spread out over multiple locations, and is in space that architects say is severely undersized and outdated.

“I don’t want people to get hung up on the site,” Khatib said. “Every site has its compromises. There is no perfect site, but I can tell you that lots of people have looked at this site, and I’m confident we’re picking the best site of all the ones we had to pick from.”