Elma Police get more room to protect and serve

Sometimes things just work out.

About three months ago, a building came up for sale basically across the street from the tiny, outdated Elma police station. Quickly, Mayor Jim Sorensen began the process of buying it to serve as a new police station. On Tuesday, he signed the papers, and the city took ownership of 326 W. Young St.

The current police station is about 1,500 square feet. It has a tiny jail cell, two stall-style bathrooms and no records or storage space — Police Chief Susan Shultz said records are stored in the basement of City Hall, a space she likened to something you’d see in a horror movie. In that same basement is a 14×14-foot space for evidence storage.

The new building, most recently the FaithLife church and prior to that Whiteside Mortuary, is a modern, updated space sprawling about 5,300 square feet.

“We have been in a 1,500-square-foot building that was ‘temporary’ for 35 years plus, so the move to this building is huge and we couldn’t be more excited about this,” said Shultz, as Sorensen signed the paperwork Tuesday.

Wednesday, Sorensen and Shultz took The Daily World on a tour of the new digs, followed by a visit to the current station. The two couldn’t be more different.

The Young Street entrance takes you into a naturally-lit lobby space. Shultz’s vision is for a reception office to the right, with a bulletproof glass partition, where visitors can be greeted and served. A few feet from there is a large auditorium-type space. There, Shultz will have her office, just inside the entry to the building, which she said will make her more accessible to the public.

The auditorium, as Shultz envisions, will be cut down to provide a couple more offices, but will still have room for City Council meetings, town hall meetings and similar events. There is a large break room with full appliances.

There will be locker rooms, with showers, something the current station doesn’t have. Just recently that proved especially inconvenient for one officer, who Shultz said had spent a portion of her shift crawling through manure.

The new building has plenty of space for records and secure evidence storage. There is a loading bay at the back of the building, where officers can drive in out of the weather before unloading gear, evidence, people in custody, etc. There will be a dedicated jail as well.

Sorensen said there is room to potentially move in other city departments, probably one, but which hasn’t been decided. In fact, it’s not as though the police department is packing up boxes to move today. There is some remodeling that needs to be done to match Shultz’s vision. “It’s going to be a process,” she said.

A half a block away at the current station, there is the tiny cell, with old-school metal rings drilled into the walls to secure the arrested. Near to that is a small bathroom. There are 10 full-time employees with the department, not all in the building at the same time of course, but still quarters are cramped. It was especially challenging when social distancing requirements were in place — Shultz said all 1,500 square feet of the building was separated into 6-foot squares with tape on the floor until just recently.

Staff meetings were out of the question; the department would have to use the fire station for those, and if that wasn’t available had to make due with what they could find.

The money for the $575,000 purchase was taken out of city reserves. Sorensen said the city is looking at getting a loan to cover $500,000 of the purchase, to take some of the pressure off the reserves. As Sorensen said Wednesday, it’s nice the city is in a position where it has the reserves to make such a purchase — that wasn’t the case a few years ago.

In the current real estate market, when values are up and available properties aren’t on the market for too long, those reserves gave the city the chance to strike fast to make the purchase — Sorensen said if the city had had to wait the couple months it can take to get a loan, the opportunity likely would have been lost.

Shultz said she felt very fortunate to work in a community that so strongly supports its emergency services, including its passage of the police operations levy this week. There were more than 50 comments under the department’s video of Sorensen getting the keys to the building, all of them positive.

DAN HAMMOCK | THE DAILY WORLD Elma Mayor Jim Sorensen and Police Chief Susan Shultz stand in the auditorium of the just-purchased new police station.

DAN HAMMOCK | THE DAILY WORLD The Elma Police Department will soon have a new, larger home with the purchase this week of the former FaithLife Church building on West Young Street.