Metro Police handcuffed by a lack of headquarters

Monday, April 24, 2006 | 7:18 a.m.

You've heard the line in countless TV police shows when the cops think they have their man: "All right, we're going down to headquarters."

When Sheriff Bill Young and his officers deliver that line in the real world, however, they have no place to go. Not really.

That's because Young is homeless - not in the traditional sense, but in terms of a headquarters for his 5,000-member staff.

Right now, a floor-and-a-half in Las Vegas City Hall serves as Young's office. That's the same amount of space that the sheriff had in 1973, when the department consisted of a mere 400 staffers.

"How ridiculous that Metro's headquarters is where I happen to be sitting at any time," Young said. "I doubt if there is a police department in the country the size of Metro that doesn't have a true headquarters."

As the department has grown, many of Metro Police's administrative functions have been shipped out to other facilities. Today, the department is scattered among 58 sites across Clark County.

But that could be on the verge of changing.

Staffers from Clark County and Las Vegas plan to meet Friday to start hammering out possible options for a Metro administrative facility and new jail space.

It's the hardest look a new Metro headquarters has received in some time - and the first time in at least a decade that the two jurisdictions are seriously talking about the possibility of a joint regional jail facility.

"I think we've got some folks starting to think along the same lines," Young said.

Besides the economic barriers, simply keeping pace with the area's growth has taken precedence over long-range law-enforcement planning in the past, Young said. Renting new substations throughout the valley has been easier and less expensive - at least initially - than undertaking a new multimillion-dollar capital project.

County and city staff will start this week by winnowing down various ideas that have been floated.

Young has suggested razing the old County Courthouse, which has been vacant since the end of last year, and building two new facilities on the 2.5-acre downtown site.

One would house a new police headquarters, allowing Young to consolidate under one roof bureaus such as internal affairs, human resources, general services, the crime lab and most detectives.

"Wouldn't it make sense to have a lot of your investigators across the street from the jail and the courthouse?" Young said.

A new headquarters would remedy thousands of inefficiencies that Metro endures now, he said.

For example, Metro's crime lab is located near the Las Vegas Beltway and Decatur Boulevard. Criminologists who need to testify in court must drive 12 miles to Metro's evidence vault at Mojave Road and Charleston Boulevard and then four miles to the courthouse. After court, they have to retrace those 16 miles.

"The problem here is windshield time," Metro spokesman Bill Cassell said.

The second of the two towers that Young proposes for the old courthouse site at 200 S. Third St. would house about 2,000 jail beds, providing some relief to the valley's overcrowded detention facilities.

Both the county and the city anticipate the need for additional jail space. By 2010, the county projects that its 2,860-bed jail will be over capacity by more than 1,000 inmates. It already is housing about 200 inmates in the city's 1,200-bed lockup, said Elizabeth Fretwell, assistant Las Vegas city manager.

The joint need could result in a new, truly regional jail facility, paid for by the city and the county. Although Metro Police is a joint city-county venture, the two jurisdictions maintain separate jail facilities.

"The more we regionalize, the better off we are from an efficiency and taxpayer standpoint," Young said.

"What we've both agreed to talk about is, 'If we both need to expand, are there economies of scale?' " Fretwell said.

The old courthouse site is ideal, Young said, because the nearby Regional Justice Center and Clark County Detention Center are connected to the old courthouse via underground tunnels.

"How much money are we saving by not having to buy vehicles to move inmates?" he said, adding that travel time and the need for vehicles for staff also would be reduced.

Residents would not see prisoners being transported between court, the sheriff's headquarters and the county jail, he said. The location would be less controversial than some alternatives because there already is a jail across the street, he said.

Young believes financing could come via a lease-purchase option, in which a private company would build the facility and assume all financial risk, then lease the building back to the county or city with the option to purchase later.

Such an arrangement would get the project off the ground without the need for a bond issue that might be unpalatable to voters, Young said.

The Molasky Group already has written a letter to the sheriff saying that the company would be interested in such an arrangement.

Molasky built the Social Security Administration facility on Buffalo Drive near West Charleston, the IRS facility at City and Grand Central parkways and Casa Grande, the transitional facility for the state Corrections Department at Russell and Wynn roads. All three facilities were built under lease-purchase arrangements.

Molasky wants the county to consider building a Casa Grande-type facility for low-level offenders to help reduce jail crowding. The project could be built for about $50,000 per bed, as opposed to $110,000 to $120,000 per bed for a full-fledged lockdown, said Molasky President Rich Worthington.

Another private firm, J.A. Tiberti Construction, is conducting site evaluations for the city of three possible downtown locations for a Metro headquarters. Tiberti's report, due at the end of this month, also will outline public and private financing options, Fretwell said.

Beyond the old courthouse site, options for a new police headquarters or jail include an eight-acre site south of the County Government Center and the current Las Vegas City Hall site, which Mayor Oscar Goodman plans to abandon for a new City Hall on the 61-acre Union Park parcel north of the Government Center.

"We need to get all of the things together on the table and discuss feasibility," said Virginia Valentine, assistant Clark County manager.

The initial working group plans to present its findings to an executive committee within about four weeks, Valentine said. That committee, composed of Young, County Manager Thom Reilly, City Manager Doug Selby and an elected official from both the county and city, will decide how to proceed.

One thing can be said with certainty about that meeting: It will not be held at police headquarters.

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