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Progress 2021 • Maryville Forum
Thursday, January 28, 2021
New MPS building, consolidated dispatch set up future opportunities Police, fire move into new, permanent home By GEOFFREY WOEHLK The Forum
MARYVILLE, Mo. — Despite all the regular issues massive projects like this must overcome, despite a negotiation that hadn’t been settled for 30 years and despite a pandemic popping up in the middle of construction, the new R. Keith Wood Maryville Public Safety facility began operation in earnest last fall — under budget and on time — marking the end of multiple journeys and the beginning of a new one. A professional space At the beginning of 2020, Maryville’s police and firefighters were working in a cramped, old grocery store, retrofitted in the 1970s, with narrow hallways and many shared spaces that had become a way of life. Officers were making do with an evidence room secured by chicken wire from the top. There was only one interview room, a straight shot from a waiting area that could make for some awkward situations if a victim and a suspect were both in the building at the same time. And it wasn’t unheard of for a conference room to be home to evidence from a drug bust at 10 a.m., and an officer’s lunch at noon. Firefighters had to fit their equipment in limited space that wasn’t really made for it, and in the garage bay, even the soda smelled like diesel exhaust because of poor ventilation. But by the end of 2020, all those
FORUM FILE PHOTOS
Maryville Mayor Benjamin Lipiec and Bryan Williamson, production manager at Nucor-LMP, wait to tour the new R. Keith Wood Public Safety Facility last year, with city officials Greg McDanel and Ryan Heiland. The new facility began operation on Sept. 30. issues, and many more, had been addressed in a building nearly three times as large, and set to grow into its full potential over the next three decades at least. “Everywhere I look, it’s such an upgrade,” said Maryville Police Chief Ron Christian in September when the new building opened. “But really, the overall theme is just that we have more specialty spaces. … We now have separate interview rooms, our dispatch office is more distinct, separate. Our booking room isn’t multifunctional, so we’re excited to be able to
have a greater separation for those people who need our services.” A much larger, secure evidence room that tracks comings and goings is designed to hold evidence for up to 30 years if necessary. And then there are the quality of life improvements, like larger locker rooms and lockers with built-in USB ports, and a multiuse, state-of-the-art conference room that will be used neither for lunch nor as a stopover for drug bust evidence. “Just … silly little things that people laugh at when I tell them,
but it means a lot to us, like having a restroom in the front lobby area,” Christian said. “You don’t really think about that, but (at the previous facility), if someone needs to use the restroom, they’ve got to have an officer come in and escort them into the back of the building, and if I’ve got someone in the back who’s been arrested — it’s just going to be (a) so much more professional environment, and hopefully a much more professional experience for people who have need of our services, whether it’s just a casual encoun-
ter or even if it’s an arrest or being a victim or whatnot. So we’re just excited about the increase in space and some of the specialty areas that allow us to do our jobs a lot more effectively.” Some parts of the building aren’t just upgrades over existing facilities, but new ones that weren’t there before at all: A sally port that will allow officers to pull patrol cars with suspects in custody into a secure part of the building, for example, and the ability to transfer See MPS, A3
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