A building is under construction for the new Mancos Marshal’s Office at 131 N. Main St.
Initially, the office was going to inhabit the old post office, but an asbestos abatement rendered it cheaper – and safer – to demolish that building.
Construction is now happening where the post office stood, with a slightly larger footprint because of the garage, Town Marshal Justen Goodall said in an email.
The town board approved the roughly $1.3 million construction project at its meeting last summer.
A grant from the Department of Local Affairs funded 75% of it, and the city is paying for the rest, Goodall said.
Over time, as call volumes increased, the Marshal’s Office outgrew its 1,000-square-foot building.
The new, 5,000-square-foot building will have more space to grow into.
“We built it for future,” said Walter Everett of Mancos, the owner of Ground Breaking LLC, the company that’s building the office.
“It’s a large building, but Justen, the marshal, wanted to make sure that we didn’t just build a building that would fit the needs of today, but would fit the needs of tomorrow as well,” Everett said.
There are five sworn officers now, and Goodall said he plans to expand to eight in the next five years.
“The complexity of calls and higher stress incidents are leading to burnout and officers leaving their careers,” said Goodall. “With more officers, I can put mental health for the officer at the highest priority. The easy mental health remedy is more vacation time to decompress from a stressful environment.”
Construction for the new office began in March and is projected to be done in a little over three months from now, in November.
“Everything has gone according to plan, there hasn’t been any anomalies or anything that we’ve discovered,” said Everett. “It’s going quite well.”
The new building will have a receptionist for public questions, three dedicated offices, an interview room, a squad room for officers, an armory, an evidence room and a three-car garage for its vehicles.
Goodall said he’s excited about the building running off solar power, with electric backup.
“The goal is to have the building be green and not use fossil fuels,” he said in an email.
Whatever solar power the building doesn’t use during the sunny months will feed into the energy grid, and the office will get a credit in return.
Plus, putting the energy to the grid eliminates the cost and anti-green effect of lithium batteries, Everett said.
All the work they’re doing, they’re trying to source locally.
“My family homesteaded here in the late 1800s, and I’m doing everything I can to only use local contractors,” said Everett. “So far, for the subcontractors, that’s all we’ve been using.”
