Harford County Sheriff's Office didn't know about the decision to switch gears to find a new location for a public safety complex.
County Executive Bob Cassilly had made the decision to pause a plan to renovate the HEAT Center into a new precinct and training center for the Sheriff's office, earlier this year.
Cassilly made the announcement today that the County plans to explore different options in a press release saying the decision was based on an "independent study that.. found the nearly 30-year-old former HEAT Center in Aberdeen.. to be inadequate for modern public safety needs."
The Harford County Sheriff's office says they learned about this from this afternoon's press release.
"After sending the County Executive’s Office multiple requests for updates, the Sheriff and the rest of his Command learned of the County Executive’s proposal through the same news release you received, we have not had a chance to digest or review the information to provide an informed response. We were not part of any meetings or studies that were mentioned in the release."
- Spokesperson for the Harford County Sheriff's Office
A spokesperson for the County Executive's office, when asked if the HCSO was involved with the study responded, "the Harford County Sheriff’s Office was not involved with the study because the county executive was looking for an independent analysis."
The Sheriff's Office had been outspoken when funds that were expected to be put toward the new Central precinct and training facility in this year's budget weren't there.
RELATED: Harford Sheriff, County Executive clash over new precinct funding
The County Council passed a resolution recommending that the funds be reinstated, to no avail.
When we reached out to the County Executive's office months ago about why this wasn't moving forward, we got a two-page statement that read in part:
"Funding the police training center and new central precinct will add an additional $3M to the County operating budget annually for decades; note that this is nearly the same amount the CE allocated in FY24 to increase police salaries. The Sheriff has also made clear his intention to increase his operating budget in the near term by more than $20M on top of the annual payments of $3M he proposes to fund the new facilities. The sheriff is also clear that he requires other capital construction in the near future beyond his immediate demand for a new central precinct and police training facility.
While public safety is our government’s most important responsibility, Harford County does not have an unlimited budget for public safety or public education. To avoid deficit spending, we must carefully align our financial resources (tax revenue) and our spending. If the CE fully funded the Sheriff’s FY24 request, the Sheriff’s operating budget would have doubled during the Sheriff’s 8 years in office.
To clarify, the Sheriff’s proposed capital projects remain in the Capital Improvement Budget, but the funds have not yet been borrowed so those projects have not been funded as the Sheriff alleges. The county executive has paused this project, along with others, pending further analysis."
The Harford County Sheriff's office has told WMAR-2 News that the new precinct is necessary to relieve the burden on the Southern precinct, which handles two-thirds of calls to police.
In materials they sent to the County Executive about the proposed new central precinct and training center project at the HEAT Center facility, they wrote that the current facilities at the Harford Community College were too small.
“In my first budget as county executive, I put the proposed HEAT Center project on hold until my administration could get a better understanding of our fiscal position and whether it was the most appropriate site and plan to meet our public safety needs now, and in the future,” County Executive Cassilly said. “I would like to thank MWS for their recommendations. It is their view that modern public safety often requires a multi-agency approach, and I intend to explore having these agencies train together in a state-of-the-art complex to facilitate interoperability and reduce costs. Most importantly, our goal will be to help deliver the highest quality public safety response for our citizens.”
-Statement released August 31, 2023
Cassilly added that the HEAT Center will instead be repurposed "to fill immediate needs for training space to support workforce development and replace existing leased spaces as part of the administration's effort to reduce county spending on commercial leases."
The Sheriff's Office released Sheriff Jeff Gahler's response on Friday afternoon.
"Unlike Bob Cassilly, I have been consistent in my message all along, the Central Precinct and Training Academy project is needed and needed yesterday and the difference in doing it a year ago or doing it later is that it cost much more to do it later. Even Bob Cassilly’s “independent review” indicates the last year of delay may have added as much as $3 million to the project’s overall costs.
Regrettably for our citizens, all of these delays by Bob Cassilly only serves to jeopardize public safety and increase the overall costs to the citizens. Not providing for the police coverage our citizens deserve, and the training academy that our law enforcement and correctional deputies need, is simply a poor decision by Bob Cassilly that was made before he even took his oath of office. This project, which has already been approved, funded and started would have repurposed an existing County building that has been vacant for 10 years. With Cassilly’s decision yesterday, Harford County taxpayers have lost over $1 million of engineering, design and stormwater management work already performed for the HEAT Center property.
As to his “new” plan, Bob Cassilly has no property identified, no design work done, no construction or engineering plans; all he has is a new idea, filled with unnecessary and unvetted supposed needs that law enforcement has not requested, all with no plan on how he is going to fund it, and, taxpayers can be assured that it will cost at least 4 or 5 times more than the existing project. I guess the good news we can all take from the County Executive’s lofty and expensive plans are that the supposed “structural deficit” must be behind us.
As far as the result of the study that Bob Cassilly forwarded to me yesterday, we are working with the architectural firm that worked on renovating this abandoned property’s plans for over 18 months, on analyzing the results of the “independent review.” The Sheriff plans on providing the County Executive and Councilmembers a more detailed response in the very near future."
-Statement from Sheriff Jeff Gahler on September 1, 2023
