ASU Police Department’s New Location: Better Proximity, Accessibility

The Angelo State University Police Department has relocated to an estimated 8,500 square foot facility within a 17,000 square foot mini-mall plaza. The building is at the Vanderventer Plaza on Johnson Street. By mid-to-late February, the ASUPD hopes construction on the new building will be done.

The police department currently uses roughly 5,000 to 9,000 square feet, which includes the police department itself and 1,500 square feet that make up the Emergency Operations Center. The EOC is a dual-purpose area, also serving as a police training facility that can hold additional meetings and conferences. In the future, the training facility/EOC area will hold various internal training sessions. The ASUPD hopes to later branch out by providing some training for surrounding law enforcement agencies.

7,000 square feet of the building is reserved for local businesses Lily’s Pizza and the Asian Market, both of which are tenants. Roughly 1,000 square feet of office space serve as academic support offices for the staff of the Laura Bush Institute and some of the professors from the Archer College of Health and Human Services.

The primary reason for the move seems to be the proximity to campus with visibility, accessibility and facility optimization as other main goals.

 “I think the convenience of the location, the fact that we have a lot more room now that we can do things – additional things, as an example, the training facility next door, which is regularly pretty state of the art,” Chief of Police James Adams, director of Public Safety said. “I think all those things are benefits to the university.”

Accessibility to the ASUPD’s building has improved because students on campus can now walk to its new location. There are sidewalks that lead from ASU’s main buildings, such as the Porter Henderson Library and Ben Kelly Center for Human Performance, to the ASUPD’s parking lot. Additionally, there is much less traffic crossing Vanderventer Avenue than when crossingAvenue N. The crosswalks leading from ASU’s library to its performance center further add to its accessibility. It was also difficult for maintenance to get to the building in golf carts because of the amount of traffic. Regarding visibility, many people considered the ASUPD’s prior location as off campus, because it was privately owned property, located between ASU’s main campus and the ASUPD’s office and surrounded by privately owned property.

The unusual benefit of the new building results from the ASUPD’s ability to discuss with architects and the construction team since the planning stages to address the police department’s needs. The architects planned with the ASUPD for about six months. “We would tell them how we wanted the space,” Adams said, “and what we needed to have in certain spaces. Of course, they would draw it up and send it back to us, and say ‘is this what you want?’ And we’d say ‘yes’ or ‘no – can you change this?’ So, there was some of that kind of back and forth with the architects, probably six months or so.”

Adams gave an example of how conversing with the architects aided the effectiveness of the ASUPD’s new building. “A lot of times, a dispatcher is the only one in the building,” Adams said, “so the officers are out on the streets, in their cars, answering their calls and doing their thing. So if a dispatcher had to go to the bathroom, they’d have to leave dispatch, go down the hall and go to the bathroom. Well, what are you going to do if the phone rings or somebody walks into the lobby, you know – that kind of thing?

“They would have to call an officer into the building to sit and dispatch while they did that. If they wanted to eat, they brought their own food to the old building – that was way down the hall, down at another hall. They had to go a long way away from dispatch to warm up the food or whatever they had brought for themselves to eat. Now, dispatch is configured where they never have to leave dispatch. They have their own refrigerator. They have their own microwave, and they have their own sink and kitchen area. They have their own bathroom – everything is right there – and theoretically, they have no reason that they would ever have to leave that particular area.”

Most of the construction on the new building is expected to be completed near the end of this February. As of Jan. 23, 2024, construction workers were adjusting the siding on the building. One of the next and more complex steps is redoing the parking lot, and then the ASUPD will be able to move the large dumpster and store their patrol cars at the new building. Adams anticipates that this step will be completed in the next week or two, but the end of February is also a realistic completion date.

The police department learned a lot from the freeze that happened in San Angelo during February 2021.“When we’ve had, for instance, a big snowstorm – about a year and a half ago to two years ago – where, for a period of time, the main campus had no electricity,” Adams said. “We just were fortunate that our building had electricity, and so we used that area as a sort of emergency operations center, because it was the only place on campus really that had power.”

At the end of mid-February, a large generator – one of the first pieces of equipment that ASU’s construction team ordered – is supposed to be installed at the ASUPD’s new building. If an event similar to the previous snowstorm happens again, the ASUPD will assuredly have power. “That’s the convenience of having the EOC – Emergency Operations Center – next door,” Adams said. “Regardless of whether we’re having a power outage or whatever in this building and the EOC, we won’t lose power, and they’ll be up and running.”

The Emergency Operations Center is a designated space that will serve Angelo State University during any event that results in a campus emergency. Here, administration and other key individuals across ASU’s campus will meet to discuss, handle and mitigate any campus emergency. An example of a campus emergency may include a tornado affecting part of the campus, which would initiate an emergency response and activate the EOC. The standard procedure that ASU follows is the National Incident Management System, which has nearly become a federal standard of how to uniformly respond to emergencies and is now widely used by U.S. agencies after 9/11.

Adams and Lt. Marc West are two of the “originals” at the ASUPD. Adams has been working at the ASUPD for 22 years and  West for 25 years. When Adams joined in Jan. 2002, he worked out of the first building, which was tiny and still stands today next to the current tower construction and now houses ASU’s counseling services. “It had two offices and that was it,” Adams said. “So when we got moved to the location at the Reidy Building, I mean, to us, that was like ‘we got a lot more space,’ so we thought that was just awesome that we had a lot more space. We weren’t cramped in one little building.”

“Then you take this move – the bittersweet part of it is… I mean, we thought that was really great at the time,” Adams said, “and then now you have this facility which is so much better. Again, it addresses those things we talked about – the convenience of being closer to campus, the extra room and space that we have, and then being able to have a training facility right next door to this.”

“I guess the bitter part might be… we were in that building for 17 years,” West said, “so we had pretty much become accustomed to that building, that facility. The sweet part is moving into a new facility with a whole lot more space, and like he says, the convenience.

“That [oldest] building was like he [Adams] said was a huge advantage over what we were in. I mean, there were, back when we were in the old building, there were 10 of us – about 14 counting dispatchers – and we all worked out of that building, which was about 1,000 square feet, so we were all cramped in there. We moved over to the old-new building over there, and we went from that 1,000 to about 5,000 square feet, so we had all that extra room, so I mean, we were able to expand and add more officers and have that space. But, I mean, we quickly outgrew that space, but the facility was good for us – provided us a lot more space for interviews and meeting with people and that kind of thing. The advantage here is just great, I mean, it’s so much better.”

Demolition day commencing construction of the ASUPD’s new building was on Feb. 3, 2023, and now almost a year of construction has taken place. Adams still remembers when there was nothing but the base structure of the new building, basically starting from scratch. “There were some supply chain issues,” West said. “The country still hasn’t recovered completely, and they’re still supply chain issues. Meanwhile, construction was moving along – there were some delays because of the supply chain, so they had to stop and wait for certain components of the building to get here before they could continue.”

Public construction began approximately a year ago, in Jan. 2023. “There was some minor stuff that most people couldn’t see as they were driving by and things were being done, but I would say probably close to a year,” Adams said. “It seems to me they started at the end of Jan. 2023 when they actually started in the building, and like you [Adams] said, they started in the building and nobody could really tell that they were working inside,” West added.

The police department used to operate out of its former building at 2601 W. Ave. N. The old building still houses the police vehicles. The ASUPD moved communication and the dispatch center into the new building first in the first week of 2024. It afterward moved the police department’s administration and then the patrol operations and support services. In the next few weeks, the police department will continue the process at a pace that suits the construction crew’s progress.