North Hempstead Town Board OKs $32M bond for Port Washington police headquarters

The Port Washington Police District will spend $32 million to build a new headquarters following a decadeslong quest to move out of its cramped space, after the North Hempstead Town Board approved the project amid some intense community opposition.

The police district can borrow $32 million over 30 years to build the new 25,000-square-foot facility at a former funeral home on Main Street. The North Hempstead Town Board voted 6-0 to approve the borrowing for the project on July 2.

The department desperately needs to move out of its headquarters, district officials have said. The current headquarters, built in 1958 and designed for 35 people, is too small for a department that employs 64 officers and 20 support staffers, officials said. The new building will be nearly triple the size of the current one, which is 9,322-square-feet and about a mile away on Port Washington Boulevard.

"It’s a big relief," said Robert Del Muro, chief of the Port Washington Police District. "This building that we're doing is for 50 to 100 years from now, so we don't have to redo this building again."

Property owners will see their police district taxes rise from $106 to $265 as a result of the borrowing for homes with values between $600,000 to $1.5 million, according to presentation prepared by the district.

The quest to build a new police headquarters has been in motion since 1997, Del Muro said. The district has struggled to replace the current headquarters, which was last renovated in the 1980s.

There are not enough lockers for officers, Del Muro said, and because the building does not have a women's locker room, female officers change in a "utility closet with active electrical conduits" retrofitted for their use, according to the presentation.  The new headquarters will have separate locker rooms for men and women.

Some residents have objected to the project, arguing the headquarters is too large for the hamlet's main business district, where it will cause traffic to jam up. In December, the district paid $8.8 million to purchase the former Austin F. Knowles Funeral Home on Main Street and six nearby homes. 

Steve Kaplan, a Port Washington North resident, organized a petition calling for a public referendum on the bond proposal. He collected more than 230 signatures, he said, but the town declined to hold a referendum.

"We believe that it's a little bit too much, and I don't know that we need that much," Kaplan said. "Now we're being pushed into a corner on something we don't agree on."

Frank Scobbo, a former police district commissioner, said the headquarters doesn't need to have such a large footprint. 

"In its current design, it's way excessive," said Scobbo, who was commissioner from 2020 until 2022. "With today's technology, you need less space. ... You don't need as much space as back in the day, you had to maintain a certain volume of records over a certain period of time."

District officials said there isn't enough space to park police vehicles, with many of them stationed off-site. The district has also run out of space to store police property and evidence. It has moved much of it to a garage, officials have said.

By Joshua Needelman

joshua.needelman@newsday.com

Joshua Needelman covers the Town of North Hempstead for Newsday. A Long Island native and University of Maryland graduate, his work has appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post.