New Oro Valley Police Department building to meet longstanding need | News

The Oro Valley Police Department has needed a new headquarters building “for two decades now,” Deputy Chief Curtiss Hicks said.

OVPD’s current 15,800-square-foot headquarters at 11000 N. La Canada Drive was too small in 1994, when the department first moved in. Today, OVPD has more than twice the personnel, and has expanded into substations on Magee Road, at Oro Valley Marketplace and in Sun City Oro Valley. A physical plant solution has become more pressing every year.

“Go back to the beginning,” Town Manager Jeff Wilkins said. “We always knew they were a little tight over there.” When he was hired three years ago, Wilkins was told finding a new headquarters for OVPD “needs to be a priority.”

It’s been found. Last summer, the Oro Valley Town Council committed $3.8 million to purchase a 50,500-square-foot former medical office building at 13101 N. Oracle.

It’s going to take time, and money, before OVPD can move in. But the process of doing so is well under way (see related stories).

Oro Valley has been working on a new OVPD headquarters “for many, many, many, many years,” Town Engineer and Public Works Director Paul Keesler said. In their effort to identify workable solutions, Keesler and others broadly analyzed how much space OVPD would need now, and in the years to come.

From the ground up, a new OVPD headquarters building might have cost between $30 million and $40 million, the town estimates. Oro Valley would have had to borrow money through bond financing, or some other means of capital creation, to create that sum, Wilkins said.

“Every time we turned around, the reality of the cost of building a new building made it untenable,” said Keesler. 

In the end, staff concluded “the best opportunity was an existing building,” Wilkins said.

Along Oracle Road, “we saw a great opportunity” in the idled medical office building, Wilkins said.

And the price was right.

“It’s a gonga deal just on its own,” Keesler said.

The Oracle Road space is more than three times the size of the existing OVPD headquarters. It has served as doctors’ offices, physical therapy spaces and an urgent care. It is well-located along Oracle Road, with quick access to three major Oro Valley arterial roadways — Oracle, Rancho Vistoso Boulevard and Tangerine Road. Structurally, it is “solid,” Keesler said. “It’s not that old.”

After the acquisition, Oro Valley budgeted $1.645 million to stabilize the building. Of that sum, $545,000 has been spent to recover the roof, patch and paint the exterior, rekey exterior doors, inspect and repair fire systems, activate utilities and inspect the 52 roof-mounted HVAC units. Some units are being replaced; others are being repaired.

Oro Valley’s current fiscal year capital budget, effective July 1, includes a $2.2 million line item to finish any needed building stabilization, to complete a design and to create construction documents, Keesler added. Some of that money rolled over from last fiscal year.

When it’s done and occupied, Keesler believes the new headquarters will be a place “the department, the community and our customers will love.” And for years to come.

“This should be the building for decades,” Wilkins said.