By Katie Garcia - January 26th 2024
JANESVILLE
Two years after ground was broken in 2022, expansion and remodeling of the Rock County Sheriff’s Office on Hwy. 14 in Janesville is expected to be completed by summer.
At a total project cost of $96 million, it will include about 200,000 square feet of new and remodeled spaces and involved tearing down what was long known as the Pinehurst building, for employee parking lot space.
Retired Rock County Sheriff Troy Knudson got the project passed through the county board in 2022.
Sheriff Curt Fell said he happy that it’s being done “right” and not incrementally.
“The fact that we’re following through on something we’ve been hoping for in the last few decades, is pretty awesome,” Fell said in an interview with The Gazette.
The Law Enforcement Services section is set to move in around the first week of June while the jail should be ready in August.
The construction has progressed steadily with no major issues, said Commander Kimberly Litsheim, who has been head of Correctional Services since February 2023.
Commander Aaron Burdick heads Law Enforcement Services, which includes the patrol bureau, the detective bureau and support services. The new building is designed to create a joint area for employees from both sections.
Employees currently work on opposite sides of the building, which Fell said is inefficient. He said he’s looking forward to everyone being closer together.
The large space and natural lighting will “be a better atmosphere that brings people together,” Fell said.
The new public entrance is already finished with tall windows and a large ceiling that allows natural light to enter, compared to the cramped, dim spaces the officers currently work in.
Just beyond the entrance is a multipurpose room for meetings, press conference and classes. It is more accessible to the public than in the current set-up, which improves security as guests now have to go deep into the building to get to a conference room, Fell said.
There are also two side rooms near the entrance where visitors can make criminal complaints privately. Beyond these rooms is a hallway with a skylight and office space to the right.
A real-time operation center is expected to be ready for use by the end of 2025, Burdick said.
Two half walls in the middle of the room will soon hold three stations each, where employees will monitor live cable, live drone footage, license plate readers, camera systems, and hopefully access to security cameras from different locations like county buildings.
There’s a committee right now researching how to get this room operational, Burdick said. “This is at the infancy stage but with the building project, we had to think years in advance to get the infrastructure built in now,” Burdick said.
Past that room is a large detective bureau space with multiple office spaces on the sides. New investigative rooms will have mounted TVs and will allow space and privacy for investigators to lay out evidence. There are also retractable walls that will allow one side to be a case room and the other a conference room, if needed.
There’s a dedicated room for internet crimes against children, a space that does not currently exist.
The new Law Enforcement Services building is a square with an enclosed courtyard for employees.
“These guys do a lot and have to see a lot of bad things, so it’s nice to be able to see the courtyard,” Burdick said.
The detective bureau will have interview rooms, custody rooms with toilets, and a soft interview room which will be set up as a family room for sensitive crimes.
A large open concept space will serve as a joint space for training on one side and emergency management on the other. There’s a private entrance for emergency management workers. This area is shut off from the rest of the building, providing security, Fell said. The emergency operation center will be used for employees working on tornadoes, floods, and other disasters.
There is also a soft padded room designated for arrest tactics, a large conference room, a briefing room, rooms for processing and storing evidence, locker rooms, an employee gym, a garage, a report writing room, storage, two dedicated dictation rooms for recording reports and a room for a mental health crisis worker from the Human Services Department.
The jail entrance still needs to be built. Its new housing units are designed with behavioral management in mind, Litsheim said. New jail housing is on its way to being complete as a two-story building with wall-lined rooms for the inmates.
One of the largest changes for the housing units are the showers, that will be accessed directly from the common room, compared to the old building where showers are accessed through a hallway, requiring more supervision.
From the new kitchen, there is a line of sight to the eating area that does not currently exist in the old building. Inmates who are cooking will also have seating when it’s their turn to eat, Litsheim said.
The new medical unit will have showers for employees, as well as restrooms and lockers, and single beds instead of bunk beds.
A laundry facility will have a washer and dryer, a new feature as the jail currently contracts for laundry. There’s also a break room for employees away from the noise of the kitchen and a view of the parking lot.
“Not only are inmates stuck in here all day, but so is our staff. So we want to make it nicer,” Litsheim said.
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