The recently completed Gila River Police Department project is located in Sacaton, Arizona, which is within the Gila River Indian Community.  As the GRIC Police Department had previously been sharing a building with the Department of Rehabilitation, growth within the Community and with Police Department staff necessitated a new, separate building for the Police Department and its related functions.

From the onset of design, the new Gila River Indian Community Police Station took an innovative approach to its connection to the community and culture, all while embracing it’s modern and functional design.  Throughout the design process, The Community’s culture and history remained a constant theme with extensive artwork by Community artists and architectural elements that were historically inspired.  The design is also a reflection of the  beauty of the unique environment of the Gila River Indian Community.

With over 50,000 sf, the building incorporates numerous Police Department functions including administration, dispatch, evidence and processing, patrol, staff support, records, locker rooms and fitness center, training, a k-9 kennel area, high bay shop area, a Community room with state-of-the-art A/v,  a  vehicle impound lot, and extensive meeting and public spaces.

As police services are required to be operational at all times, the challenges of moving police operations from one building to the other are formidable.  Answering these challenges, the TynanGroup project team developed innovative solutions during the moving of staff and the installation of equipment to the new facility, including facilitating redundant communication systems at both locations.  These included a dispatch system that would allow dispatch to operate from both the old building location as well as the new building, incorporating a new Community wide emergency communication system (including microwave tower), and proper relocation of records and evidence, which requires a chain of custody that cannot be severed.

The new Gila River Police Department building is the first police department to utilize the innovative federal 105L leaseback program, developed by the Gila River Indian Community, to fund the construction.  The project is the third GRIC project utilizing this innovative lease program between the Gila River Indian Community and the Department of the Interior (prior projects were the GRIC Gila Crossing and Casa Blanca Schools, both managed by TynanGroup).  This lease is executed as part of the Department of the Interior’s section 105(l) leasing program contained in the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (ISDEAA).  The program furthers tribal self-determination through lease negotiations to compensate tribal nations for programs that are part of ISDEAA’s contracting or compacting authority.