Renovated office building touted as upgrade for Agawam PD

AGAWAM — It might not be brand new, but the next headquarters for Agawam police is at least like-new.
Unlike the nearly 110-year-old building police call home, “this facility is designed to be a police station,” Mayor Christopher C. Johnson said during a recent tour.
In a converted insurance office, dispatchers already are answering 9-1-1 calls in the new police station at 1070 Suffield St. The rest of the police offices will move, bit by bit, over the course of the next two months.
For nearly 40 years, Agawam’s police have been housed in a former elementary school on Springfield Street in Feeding Hills. It was obsolete the moment police moved in, said Johnson, who began his first tenure as mayor a couple years after the move.
He said police offices were crammed into the existing rooms, wherever they fit, with little consideration of workflow, privacy or security. At the time, the town did not have a budget for extensive renovations, he said.
On their tour, Johnson and Police Lt. Edward McGovern pointed out how parts of the new station that will be open to the public are clustered in the front of the building, away from sensitive areas. These public-facing areas include the records window, a window to the dispatchers’ room, an interview room that doubles as a fingerprinting station and an office for the Behavioral Health Network clinician who rides along with police.
Similarly, the booking room and holding cells are next to the sally port — the secure garage where police cars carrying arrestees arrive, far away from any doors to the outside, armories or evidence rooms.
“There was a lot of thought given as to how the workflow would work,” Johnson said.
In the new station, evidence will be kept in one large, secure, climate-controlled room. The old station has evidence split among four locations, scattered throughout the building, wherever the evidence officers could find space. One of those spaces is a musty cellar down a wooden staircase.
Another upgrade is the locker room. Officers are carrying a lot more electronic equipment now than they did in the 1980s, Johnson said. At the Springfield Street station, there aren’t enough outlets — and certainly not enough outlets in convenient locations — for officers to store and charge it all. Many bring their devices home to charge. In the new station, every locker has a charging station. The new lockers themselves are much larger than those at the old station.
“This is a huge, huge upgrade over what you have now, which is essentially old school lockers,” Johnson said to McGovern.
The locker rooms are one example of how the new station gives the Police Department room to grow as policing needs change in the coming decades. Although the town only has 48 patrol officers on its roster now, the locker rooms have space for 63 men and 14 women.
The facility ended up costing the town about $14 million, including the $2.17 million to buy the property from its former owner, Hub Insurance, in 2022. Police had been asking for a new home for a long time, and this was the most economical way to get them one, the mayor said.
“A new station would be two times the cost, at least,” Johnson said.
Taking over an existing office building saved the town from having to construct the foundation, exterior walls or roof. The station also makes use of existing climate control, plumbing and electrical utilities, and several interior walls.
Hub also included several pieces of furniture in the sale.
Secure areas, such as the holding cells and evidence room, required the most intense renovations. Other important features of the renovation included the communications and data systems for emergency dispatch — the police station serves as the 9-1-1 center for all of the town’s first responders, including fire and ambulance — as well as a diesel backup generator that can power the station for 72 hours.
Back in 2022, town officials envisioned completing renovations in fall 2024. The project was delayed a year because vendors delivered the generator and its electrical panel several months behind schedule.
Although it’s a twice-renovated building — before being used as an insurance office, it was originally the Oaks banquet hall — Johnson said the new police headquarters has enough space and modern amenities to last 50 years, just like a new-construction police station.
The town will host an open house at the police station, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 13, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at noon. The event will include full tours of the facility. After that date, police will begin moving evidence, records and sensitive equipment into the building, and the secure rooms will be off-limits to visitors.
Patrol officers will be the next group to move, followed by administrative offices, and then the “painstaking” process of moving 40,000 pieces of evidence, all of which must be logged when leaving the old station, transported by a uniformed officer, and re-logged when being filed in the new evidence room. Some of the evidence belongs to cases dating back decades; modern laws, according to McGovern, require keeping some types of evidence for 100 years.
Moving the station from Springfield Street to Suffield Street will not affect response times, Johnson said. Almost all police calls are answered by officers on active patrol in the community, and the patrol assignments will not change. He said there might be some increased efficiencies from having the town’s Department of Public Works, which repairs police vehicles, and a Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency regional office both within walking distance on Suffield Street.
Johnson said he hasn’t determined the long-term fate of the current police station building, which originally opened in 1916 and was known as the Faolin Peirce School until being renovated for police use in 1987. After the police move out, he plans to use it as temporary storage for furniture and equipment displaced as portions of Agawam High School are torn down to make way for a new high school building.