BUNNELL – After multiple years of flux, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office finally has a long-term home. A brand new operations center was debuted to the public on Monday, with a ribbon-cutting attended by leaders within the FCSO and the community.
“This new building will allow us to better serve our community and have a more efficient, effective, and reliable building for our employees to work from for decades to come,” Sheriff Rick Staly said of the new center. “I am grateful for the Board of County Commissioners and the design and construction team for working together to make this day possible.”
The facility comes with an estimated price tag of $20 million, a substantial portion of the already sizeable portion of funds diverted to FCSO purposes. In the four years since the FCSO’s last long-term home, the makeup and operations of the office have changed considerably. Sheriff Staly had been in office for less than a full term when he and his staff had to evacuate the facility on SR-100 which caused endemic health issues, giving it the nickname ‘mold ops’. They’d been in that building for less than three years.
At this new facility behind the Government Services Building just down the street from mold ops, Staly and his crew are hopeful nothing comparable will happen this time around. The brand new facility includes ample space to keep FCSO vehicles, a physical fitness center, an expanded real time crime center, and reinforcement measures designed to thwart cyber-attacks against the FCSO’s evidence database.
The FCSO worked with Architects Design Group, a firm out of Winter Park, to sculpt the new facility to its specific needs. Two new wings and other sections are expected to be added at a later date, adding 30,000 square feet to a building which already spans 6,298 sq ft.
Well I guess Staly got what he wanted. However it makes me wonder was it really necessary for a brand new building. Sizemore is taking over the old building on RT 100 in Bunnell that was converted from the old hospital to the sheriff’s operation center and then determined was unhealthy to work in that building because of mold. So how can Sizemore go into the same building and operate his business and everything be ok but the sheriff’s employees could not? I’m thinking it was all because the old Sheriff Manfre had the old hospital building deal done under his term and Staly didn’t like that and he wanted his own deal with a new building. The entire deal from start to finish sounds all to fishy to me.
I also wonder how a building is going to help serve the community. It’s not the building it’s the people in it. If they would get their s**t together they should be able to serve the community in the highest standard even if they are working out of a cardboard box. JMO