City of Branson buys land for new police department

(From the City of Branson)

The Branson Board of Aldermen has approved a contract to purchase a 5.5-acre piece of land from the Tanstone, LLC for about $950,000 that will be the future home of the new Branson Police Department building.

The land is located at Forsyth and Oak Creek Drive. The City will purchase this land and is looking at additional land for a new fire station, using the Public Safety Fund, fulfilling what the City promised to do after citizens passed the public safety sales tax in 2017.

“We made a promise to spend that money on the taxpayers and to improve their safety and that’s what we are going to do. Purchasing this land to expand our police services is a great start,” said City Administrator Stan Dobbins.

Not only will the centralized location allow the Branson Police Department to expand in number, something they have no space for in its current building, but the location will allow a centralized hub for citizens to access Police services with a new state of the art Emergency Operations Center (EOC) that will double as a community room. As the City of Branson continues to grow, the community room will be regularly used by community partners and police working on sustainable solutions to neighborhood issues.

While this new building provides the ability to grow the Department, it more importantly, will provide the opportunity to align the department with Industry Standards regarding:

Dispatch Services
Evidence Collection/Storage
Records/Records Retention
Investigations / growth/technology
Officer Wellness (work-out facilities/showers)
Patrol Operations (technology/intelligence lead policing)

In addition to approving the purchase of the land, the Board also approved the purchase of new mobile radios for the police and fire departments, new in-car and body cameras for the police department, and two new school resource officers for the Branson Public School District. City officials are also in the process of acquiring land for a new fire station that will also be purchased through the public safety sales tax.

Once the land is acquired for the fire station, the City will take requests for proposals for architects to design both the fire and police stations plus and an engineering firm to build the two buildings. City officials would like to break ground on these buildings in 2019. This is all part of the City keeping its promise to the community, when residents passed the safety sales tax, to keep the community a safe place to live, work and play.

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