The Guam Police Department is making moves to centralize supporting services and save money for the department in the long run by reducing the number of leased properties and replacing them with properties they can really call home.
It may not look like it, but the Hakubotan building is the home of the boating registration division of the Guam Police Department and has been since November of last year.
Costing GPD $25,000 a month under a two-year lease, GPD Chief Stephen Ignacio said the lease is paid through two funding sources. The general fund pays for the bulk of the lease at $15,000 while the remaining $10,000 is funded through the regional boating safety federal grant.
“About 4,000 square feet of the office is dedicated to the operations of the boating safety grant. It includes two program coordinators and the clerk in front of the reception area for people to come in and register their boats. We also have a training room. The training room is important because we also have the water safety courses that we provide to the general public in relation to our boating safety grant,” Ignacio said.
Ignacio said they outgrew the previous building which housed the boating division and when the bid for new office space was done a year ago the only bid received was for Hakubotan.
“So now we have our personnel payroll supply and of course the boating division and our administrative officers and clerks … we have a total of 16 employees that operate the support side of GPD operations. They were kind of scattered so with this we were able to centralize everything related to our civilian staff and the support group,” Ignacio said.
Sinajana precinct
But this is not the only facility change the department has in the works.
On Thursday, GPD will open the doors to its new central precinct command in Sinajana.
“The precinct is about three times bigger than the current precinct. We are going from about a little over a 3,000 square-foot building to a 10,000 square foot facility. It’s a very modern facility. It’s very big and spacious and it also meets the demand now and for growth in the future. We look forward to the new precinct and we are excited that we finally have a precinct that we can call our own,” Ignacio said.
Then, there is the Evidence Control Section which is anticipated to be built in Yigo near the power station and Yigo gym.
“We are in the final stages of the review of our application to move forward with the US Army Corp of Engineers. Once we get the authorization to proceed from there, we will start to move forward with working with DPW to do construction management for this new facility we are planning to build. So there’s a lot of good stuff going on and we are excited and can’t wait to move forward with that next project,” Ignacio said.
He added that the ECS building project, which is estimated to cost a little over a million dollars, will be funded with grants from the Department of Interior. Currently, the evidence section is housed at a warehouse on Bello Road which is being leased by the department.
According to Ignacio, they would like to start construction soon on the ECS building so that GPD will be able to get out of the lease and put the funding to good use on a place they can call their own.
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