Branson approves funding for new police headquarters

Branson Police Chief Eric Schmitt characterizes the workspace inside his department’s current headquarters at City Hall as feeling like he and his staff are sometimes in a sardine can.

The Branson Police Department, which he said is close to fully staffed with 60 officers and roughly 30 civilian employees in positions such as dispatchers, animal control and records clerks, works in approximately 9,000 square feet.

“There’s just a lot of challenges. Our patrol officers, if they have to come and do reports, they’re on top of each other in the report-writing room,” he said. “So, they’re crammed in here quite tightly.”

On-site evidence storage is largely nonexistent, Schmitt said.

“Right now, our space is pathetic,” he said. “It’s basically a closet, so we have to hold all our evidence in an off-site location. That’s not ideal.”

The city of Branson is taking steps to remediate the Police Department’s space constraints – a process that recently received a boost from the Board of Aldermen. The board approved a $10 million bond that, combined with over $6 million saved up in tax revenue, gives the green light to fully fund the budgeted $16 million new Police Department project.

The plan is to move the department by December 2025 into the former White House Theatre, which the city purchased for $2.5 million in 2022, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. The city auctioned off contents of the shuttered 65,000-square-foot theater last year with proceeds going toward renovation of the property.

Building plan
Redesign of the 2255 Gretna Road building calls for 42,360 square feet to house the Police Department, a temporary holding facility and a training room that also can be used for community needs, according to city officials. The remaining roughly 23,000 square feet will comprise future undetermined usage. Cornerstone Building Services LLC is general contractor for the project designed by Kansas City-based Hoefer Welker LLC, Schmitt said.

The new building will have evidence storage, administrative offices for both police and Branson Fire Department personnel, vehicle evidence areas, locker rooms and a workout area. There also will be space for K-9 officers and a larger booking space for suspects.

“We’re going to be able to (keep) evidence in the backstage area where we have intake on the top of the loading dock, and then our crime and evidence techs will have an elevator that goes right downstairs,” Schmitt said. “That entire lower level is going to be secure storage for our evidence. We’ll be able to hold everything on-site.”

Schmitt said the new facility also will provide the first crime lab for the department.

“As we get grants and stuff, we can get rapid DNA and other things that’ll help us solve crimes quicker,” he said.

Michael Woods, the city’s director of public works and engineering, said money from the existing public safety sales tax will pay back the bond. Branson residents passed the half-cent sales tax in 2017 to help fund public safety measures like updating and replacing old equipment and growing the police and fire departments. Tax funds paid for a new $5 million fire station at 251 Champagne Blvd., which opened in May, according to past SBJ reporting.

City of Branson Finance Director Cherri Phifer said the tax collected over $7.6 million in 2023. The total is a 3.1% increase over 2022, according to city data.

While police personnel will be able to spread out significantly in the new headquarters, Woods said he’s excited about the training space.

“They’ll have training rooms and conference rooms where they can bring training to us versus us sending everybody to training,” he said.

Schmitt said the training area will have capacity for 108 people and is dividable into two spaces, which could allow police and fire to hold sessions simultaneously. It also will include a kitchenette to allow for food service.

“Hopefully, we can bring in out-of-state, nationally recognized trainers and then also allow community groups to use it when we’re not using it for training,” he said.

Not everyone in the police department will make the move, as Schmitt said it would have been cost prohibitive to expand the project to include the 16 dispatchers.

“We’re working on a separate project to put them in a different location,” he said, declining to disclose the site.

Woods said the dispatchers will be in existing space but added the city isn’t quite ready to announce plans. He added once the Police Department moves out of City Hall, some of the space will be used for conference rooms, but full utilization of the square footage is yet to be finalized.

Staying busy
The police department is staffed 24/7 and runs on average four or five officers and a sergeant per shift, Schmitt said. A member of the department since 2017, Schmitt was promoted to chief in late 2022.

“We actually stay pretty busy. We have 22 square miles of space to patrol out here,” he said. “We’re on 10-hour shifts, so we have a pretty good overlap in our busier times. We tend to be fairly busy between about 10 a.m. and about 10 p.m.”

Dispatch calls were up 16% last year from 2022’s total of 34,062, he said, noting police calls accounted for roughly 24,000 of that number. The police call load was up 18% last year from 2022.

“We do a lot of traffic accidents. We have a fair number of domestic violence situations, especially with the number of people that come to town,” he said. “We also do welfare checks and drug-related issues that we deal with just like any community, and then some property crime. We work hard, especially in the tourist times, to encourage people not to leave valuables in plain view and that kind of stuff.

“Normally, we try to educate people, but the problem is every week we have to educate a new group of vacationers. It’s like traffic enforcement is really engineering, education and enforcement – and they go in that order.”

Schmitt said his department has been fortunate to avoid hiring difficulties over the past couple of years, noting while it has a couple dispatcher roles to fill, all its sworn positions became fully staffed within the past couple of months. He said boosting pay for officers has been a priority, noting the city approved a 10-step pay scale that allows for multiple raises.

Officers start at $48,450 a year and they can top out at $84,648 a year, he said, adding sergeants are topping out at $106,078 a year.

“That really helps us get them within the first three, four years of being employed here, to (have) enough raises that it very much discourages them from laterally moving to some other department because they would take a pay cut to leave us,” he said.

Schmitt credits Ralph Leblanc, who was new to the Board of Aldermen, with suggesting the city consider purchasing the former theater property to renovate into a new police department home instead of building from the ground up.

“It seemed like a crazy idea, repurposing a theater,” Woods said. “But it’s probably one of the smartest things that the city has done. It allows us to get us over to the building quicker.”