Police board: Sault police station 'well past its prime'

Members of the Police Services Board say it’s time for Sault Ste. Marie Police Service to move into a new home after being taken on a tour of the Second Line East facility last week. 

During a meeting held Thursday, Board member Rick Webb says the tour only confirmed discussions the police board has had with regards to the police station over the years. 

“There’s literally no room for any expansion — offices are filled with boxes. It’s a maze,” said Webb, adding that the facility is “woefully inadequate.” 

“This building is well past its prime,” he continued. “It’s in a bad location. It needs to change and it needs to move.”

Fellow board member Matthew Shoemaker, a Ward 3 city councillor who will run for mayor in this year’s municipal election, said the building “doesn’t fit the needs of the service that we have today.”  

“I think it was obvious to anyone who attended that tour that was given to us that the place was built for a service that existed in the 1990s, and some of it, a service that existed in the 1960s,” he said. 

In the decade he was on the Police Services Board prior to his reappointment in 2019, Ian MacKenzie said the state of the police station was brought up “several times.”

“No, it hasn’t improved, and it’s only getting worse,” MacKenzie said.

Shoemaker added that a new police headquarters should be situated downtown. In December 2021, Shoemaker laid out his argument for a new police station in a letter to SooToday, referring to the current facility as a “money pit.” 

“I think that my position is known and ought to be perhaps on the record that whatever we can put downtown ought to be put downtown, because I think that’s where our greatest needs are as a community in terms of outreach and enforcement, and I think that is where any aspect of the force that can be down there should be down there,” he said. 

The police station originally opened its doors in 1968.