The North Bay Police Service is hiring a Needs Analyst through the City of North Bay to scour through the 40-year-old building.
Police Chief Shawn Devine says Police Headquarters is just like anyone’s home, there are some inefficiencies.
“The building is 40 years old, as things age they get more costly to just operate the building," noted Devine.
“I think we are fortunate in the size of building that we have, what we do struggle with sometimes is that when the building was built back in the 1970’s there was no anticipation of the new sections that we have so, accident reporting wasn’t around, victims support wasn’t around so the footprint of our building is quite good, we may look at how we re-jig the inside of that building so that’s something we would be reaching out to a professional to give us some advice on that.”
While there may be some changes, Devine isn’t anticipating any major renovations.
“I think if there is any kind of movement that way it will definitely be the board that makes that decision, the other part about it too is if that decision is made, it will be based on a business case that would involve some kind of savings, like is it going to be more expensive to run this building for another 20 years or would it be better to look at something that is more energy efficient, is the cost of changing windows worth the money you are going to save back,” said Devine.
“We’ve changed more than 1500 light bulbs in the building to LED lights to try and achieve some efficiency. On the front of that is about at $50,000 expenditure trying to save $100,000 over a longer term so everything is going to be based on a financial look of the efficiency of the building.”