Columbia City Council approves police substation lease

Police in Columbia will have a new substation in the northeast part of town.

The Columbia City Council unanimously approved a lease with Wynwood Townhouses off Aztec Boulevard. The lease, which starts July 1, will cost the department $300 a month, and will last for three years.

Assistant Chief John Gordon told the council Monday that the first floor of the townhouse will serve as a “substation” for the patrol officers in that area. With CPD’s patrol broken into four geographic “beats,” Gordon envisions the station as a place for officers to write reports, and possibly reduce response times for calls to that section of town.

Gordon said beat officers have been “basically screaming” for some relief to the commute from the northeast side of town to the department’s headquarters downtown. With three computers set aside for it, Gordon said the officers will be able to complete their reports at the townhouse. Gordon said officers will still need to take people they arrest to a holding cell downtown, or the county jail.

“A travel time for an officer coming from Ballenger Lane and Clark [Lane], that’s twenty minutes of lost time,” Gordon said. “These officers don’t want to do that. They don’t want to come back to the Columbia Police Department to do their reports. They’d rather stay out in their areas. So we’re trying to identify more and more of these.”

The Community Outreach Unit will also work from the second floor of the townhouse. Currently, one of the three COU teams works that area of town. Gordon said the particular location puts them “in the neighborhood,” rather than choosing a larger, commercial space elsewhere.