If Tulsa gets a new public safety center, does it need to be downtown? Public safety officials weigh in

The facility would house under one roof separate Police and Fire department headquarters, the Tulsa Area Emergency Management Agency and other public safety-related entities.

It’s an idea city leaders have been bandying about for several years, but due in part to a lack of funding, officials have been reluctant to speculate on where the facility would be located.

The one possible site that has been made public — the former State Farm Insurance corporate headquarters in east Tulsa — is an 11-mile trek from downtown, where TAEMA and the Police Department are headquartered in one building and the Fire Department in another.

Mayor G.T. Bynum said recently that he is not concerned about moving those operations out of the city’s core — and that neither are the leaders who run those departments.

“We have talked with police leadership, fire leadership, Tulsa Area Emergency Management, city medical, and the courts,” Bynum said. “The only people that really need to be inside downtown are the courts, because they need to have close proximity to the county courthouse so that attorneys can get back and forth between the two easily and quickly.”

Bynum said it was important to remember that the State Farm property is just one of several sites being considered and that the city’s Municipal Court would not be part of the new public safety complex.

“We want to be a tenant of whatever the county ends up doing (with its courthouse),” Bynum said. “But police headquarters, fire headquarters, those don’t have to be downtown.

Councilor Jayme Fowler put the question directly to Police Chief Wendell Franklin and Fire Chief Michael Baker during an April committee meeting.

“I think for me it would be more convenient to be closer” to downtown, Baker said. “I just don’t know the property picture that we have available, especially downtown.”

Franklin echoed Baker’s sentiments.

“I love working downtown; I love being downtown, and it certainly is convenient to the meetings that we attend,” Franklin said. “But I am looking at the landscape, not seeing a lot of opportunity for government to purchase facilities downtown.”

The more important issue, both men indicated, is that the new facility — wherever it is located — has the space, infrastructure and parking to address the growing needs of their departments while reflecting well on the city.

“We like to say we can work from anywhere; it doesn’t matter what the conditions are,” Franklin told councilors. “But as we go out and try to promote this city, try and promote this department, talk about the technology we are deploying and all of that, to then have a facility — a main facility — that is in the condition that police headquarters is in is, quite frankly, laughable.”

Police headquarters has been in the Police Courts Building, at Sixth Street and Elwood Avenue, since 1969. The structure, which is also home to Municipal Court, TAEMA and the city jail, has been plagued by structural problems and space limitations for years.

Fire Department headquarters, at 1760 Newblock Park Drive, has its own long list of problems and sits within a floodplain.

The old State Farm corporate headquarters, just north of the Broken Arrow Expressway and west of 129th East Avenue, occupies 45 acres near the Tulsa Health Department’s James O. Goodwin Health Center. Both are accessible on Tulsa Transit’s 310 bus route.

In an interview with the Tulsa World, Baker said the “main thing is to have a good building, easily accessible to the public. And as it relates to location, people are going to have to travel either way.”

TAEMA Director Joe Kralicek said his agency’s operations center is expected to be open and operating within an hour of a crisis, so the location of the public safety complex is important but not necessarily paramount.

TAEMA’S existing emergency management center, Kralicek said, is intended to hold 40 people, but during a crisis 140 to 200 people routinely attend meetings.

“My big issue is always making sure that I can get all the people there that I need,” Kralicek said. “Right now, the facility that I have, I can’t get everybody that I need down there because I don’t have enough parking, and we don’t have enough space for everybody.”

District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said he’s grateful that Franklin and other city leaders have had the vision to identify and address the need for new public safety facilities. The District Attorney’s Office is in the Tulsa County Courthouse, next door to the Police Courts Building.

“I am confident that this center will take into consideration — wherever it is located — the needs associated with running a modern courthouse,” Kunzweiler said.

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