No police station in Esquimalt public-safety building

Construction of a new threestorey public-safety building in Esquimalt is scheduled to begin this summer, but it won’t include a new police station, as previously planned.

Instead, the building — with an estimated cost of just under $48 million — will house the fire department, an emergency-operations centre and offices for the Capital Regional District.

The Esquimalt division of the Victoria police will continue to occupy space on the basement floor of municipal hall.

Mayor Barb Desjardins said part of the reason council chose to scale the building back and eliminate the police station was that “VicPD were happy with where they were.”

Police moved to the municipal hall and the fire department moved into a temporary facility after the old public-safety building was demolished.

“The fire department was in a much more temporary situation,” Desjardins said. “They were a priority.”

She said council also considered “the flux of where we were with policing.”

“We felt that we could probably leave policing until we had an understanding of what we might be doing.”

Council is exploring the possibility of Esquimalt re-establishing its own police department, rather than continuing with the shared-policing agreement it has had with Victoria since 2002.

Desjardins noted that a consultant’s report on the topic said the space being used by Victoria police in Esquimalt would also be suitable for a newly created Esquimalt force.

Council said last May that the cost of the public-safety building, which then still included space for police, had jumped to $62.2 million from $42 million in February 2021 due to sharply rising construction costs.

Among cost-saving options considered at the time were eliminating the building’s third floor, or cancelling or deferring the project.

Esquimalt said in a statement last week that it would have been “financially imprudent” to go ahead with that version of the building.

Fire Chief Matt Furlot said the new facility will provide a state-of-the-art seismically engineered structure as well as essential training amenities such as a classroom and a high-angle training tower.

The building is expected to be complete in the summer of 2025.