City Council wants to see movement for police headquarters

Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux is working with the City Council to get on the same page about plans for a new Shreveport Police Department headquarters. The mayor said recent developments related to the condition of the headquarters building exposed a need for better communication between the administration and the council.

“If we’re guilty of anything, we’re guilty of not keeping the council fully advised about the status of the headquarters building,” Arceneaux said. “We began working on that right after we took office.”

The mayor said funds for designing a new police headquarters were included in a bond sale in 2022 before his administration took office. Those funds were designated for design, not construction, and the project was not started before Arceneaux took office.

The process started in April 2023. Arceneaux explained that the project’s specifics added an extra layer of complexity.

“This is a complicated project, because you have a demolition of most of the existing building, and then you have a rebuilding of that,” he said. “So it’s a very extensive project.”

City officials also had to present their expectations for the project to the prospective architects.

“You don’t just throw something out there for architects to come up with ideas,” Arceneaux said. “You give them some idea of what your needs are, and then they come back with their concepts and proposals.”

A request for submissions was issued in May 2023. A selection committee was selected in August of that year.

Presentations were made in September 2023. Prevot Design was chosen as the architect from those presentations, and the contract was fully executed in January 2024.

Since then, the city has been working with Prevot to balance the needs for the new headquarters with the money available for the project.

“We have been having meetings with the architect to try to bring this project in within the funds that are available,” he said. “It is our current view that those funds are insufficient for what the police department feels it needs. So, we have been looking at the potential to supplement the bond funds from 2021.

“The council gave a fairly clear direction that they want us to build it within the funds we have, so we’ll communicate with the architect about the changes we might need to make in the design.”

In late September, the city council postponed a vote on the sale of bonds in a bond initiative passed earlier this year for capital improvement projects across the city. That vote was delayed due to concerns about needing more progress on the police headquarters project.

“Since that time, we have moved very quickly to identify temporary sites, which we knew we had to do but thought we would do a little later in the game,” Arce-neaux said. “We think within a week or two we will have those sites identified. We hope that when we provide more information to the council, they will see that we are, in fact, moving with deliberate speed to both move people out and to build the new headquarters building.

“Basically, we have been working steadily on this process since early in our term. But it’s a long process. The reason we haven’t sold those bonds is we haven’t been ready to bid the project, so we didn’t need to sell the bonds. We could sell the bonds. We would begin paying interest on the bonds after we sold them. We thought it more prudent not to sell those bonds. But we haven’t been delayed in any way, shape or form.”