News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The City of Cookeville will begin accepting bids next week for its new police station.
Cookeville Police Major Scott Winfrey said the overall design of the building has now been completed. Winfrey said the department’s main goal and challenge while planning the new facility was making the building as efficient as possible.
“We didn’t want a lot of wasted time, and people having to go long distances to speak to someone or take something to someone,” Winfrey said. “We wanted to make sure a lot of thought went into the design in what we call adjacencies.”
Winfrey said divisions that work closely together are located near each other to improve the flow of the building. In order to maintain all essential elements to the building, the hallway sizes were reduced from eight to six feet.
The design includes a community meeting room with a retractable partition that could expand the room into an alternate emergency operation center Winfrey said the meeting room also includes a training room for officers. It will host traffic court every Tuesday.
The Police Department has been operating under the Cookeville Performing Arts Center for years. Winfrey said the new facility will provide police more space to protect a growing community.
“We have had a lot of community support and definitely the support of the city council and city government,” Winfrey said. “A lot of people have put in a lot of long, hard hours at the police department and with engineers and architects.”
The Cookeville Police Department expect bids to be back sometime in June. Winfrey said a state date for construction remains up in the air. When construction does start, the building must be completed in 70 weeks.
“When the tornado hit and with the onset of COVID-19, that has set us back about a month to a month and a half,” Winfrey said. “We were at the point of refining the plans when the tornado hit..”
