Beaumont council reviews $75 million police station concept, directs staff to seek program manager

Beaumont — At a City Council workshop on Aug. 25, 2025, council members reviewed conceptual designs and a preliminary funding plan for a proposed police station campus on a portion of a 9-acre site off Beaumont Avenue and directed staff to develop a procurement package to hire a program manager to refine costs and funding options.

The proposal presented by Jeremy Hart, an architect with LPA, and city finance consultants estimates a construction cost of about $67.9 million if construction begins in March 2027, with escalation and contingencies pushing planning figures higher. Michael Bush, a finance consultant working with the city, said the council should plan on a working assumption of roughly $75 million for the project budget while recognizing higher total-project estimates that include soft costs and prior expenditures.

The design includes a single-story headquarters with separate outbuildings for property/evidence and animal control, secure employee parking, a sally port for arrestees, and a training/firing range. Hart said the team assumed a 20-month construction schedule and a traditional design-build delivery; “the first assumption we made was it was gonna take 20 months to build,” he said. He described a campus layout that places essential, seismically hardened functions in the main building and less-critical uses in lower-cost outbuildings to control cost.

Why it matters: the facility is intended to serve anticipated growth. City presenters said the police staffing projection for the next 30 years informed the program: current staffing is 62 sworn officers and 92 employees; the design projects capacity for roughly 95–100 officers and 130–140 employees. Bush and staff stressed that the city must reconcile capital costs with the ability to staff and operate an expanded department.

Key cost and technical details

- Construction estimate: LPA’s conceptual hard-construction estimate is $67,900,000, based on a midpoint of construction of January 2028 and bidding in January 2027.…