County police may move headquarters to Grasslands

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County police may move headquarters to Grasslands

By KEITH EDDINGS

THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original publication: June 10, 2005)

Westchester County police headquarters would move about two miles up Route 9A, from a site beside the Saw Mill River Parkway in Hawthorne to the Grasslands Reservation in Valhalla, under a plan presented this week.

The proposal, by Public Safety Commissioner Thomas Belfiore, calls for building a 13,200-square-foot headquarters costing $8.8 million off Dana Road at Grasslands near sites that already house the county's police academy and fire training center. The new building would house the Police Department's administrative offices while the department's operations center, where patrols begin and end, would remain in the low-rise, red brick building along the Saw Mill parkway that police have occupied since 1952.

"That's a pretty good spot for it," Belfiore said yesterday about the Grasslands site. "It consolidates emergency services people, it puts me near the police academy and, going down the road, there could be a vision to put first responders together in a campus environment where there would be cross-training to further this post-9/11 environment of cooperation among all the first responders."

The county Department of Emergency Services already is housed on Dana Road at Grasslands where, among other things, it coordinates the response by local police and fire departments to major emergencies.

Belfiore's plan for the new police headquarters was among dozens of capital projects that eight county commissioners presented earlier this week to a committee that will cull the projects into a capital budget proposal for next year. The proposal will go to County Executive Andrew Spano — who also chairs the Capital Projects Committee — and then to the county Board of Legislators.

For now, the county departments, along with the airport and the sewer, water and garbage districts that the county operates are requesting $121.8 million for new and ongoing projects next year.

Spano was not at this week's meeting. His chief adviser, Susan Tolchin, would not comment on the proposed projects because they are preliminary.

Belfiore said police have outgrown the 35,000-square-foot building along the Saw Mill parkway.

"If you look at this facility, it was built in 1952 to accommodate a much more limited function for the parkway police, which then (patrolled) only parkways and parks," he said. "We do all of that, and we've evolved to add a narcotics unit, an environmental security unit, a counter-terrorism unit, a warrants unit, a crime analysis unit, a canine unit, a bomb squad."

Belfiore asked the capital committee for $700,000 to design the new headquarters. He said he has a Plan B to move the headquarters into an existing building at Grasslands. A third plan to expand the existing headquarters and build a parking garage behind it has been scrapped.