The City Police Station has been leaking for years. And so, too, has the Canberra headquarters for our local police, the Winchester Centre in Belconnen.
Built in 1966, City Police Station is a three-storey building which sits within the ACT's heritage-listed Law Courts precinct.
Whenever major downpour occurs in the city, the gutters of the near-flat 50-year-old roof overflow and water flows down into the building's lowest points.
The lowest point is where the ACT locks up its offenders overnight: the underground ACT Watch House.
But the leakage is shared around equally among the incarcerated and those wearing the blue uniforms as the dripping also infiltrates the ground floor general duties muster room and the offices of most senior officers stationed there, including the North District superintendent.
The ACT's chief police officer Neil Gaughan, who leaves the top job on March 22, says he has been "banging away" at the ACT police accommodation problems for years.
The ACT government, and specifically the Richard Glenn-led Justice and Community Safety Directorate, has control of all policing accommodation in the ACT.
And while ACT Fire and Rescue has been promised three new stations - in the City, Molonglo and Acton - over the next seven years, the only new premises pledged for police and opened recently was the new Road Policing Centre in Hume.
But the Hume premises was a necessity and a priority because the old traffic operations building on Lathlain St, behind the Winchester centre, was slugged with an official Provisional Improvement Notice (PIN) by ACT Worksafe when it was found the ventilation system held up by police tape and water was rolling down the bathroom walls.
Now the City Police Station is facing the same risk after Deputy Commissioner Gaughan on Wednesday ordered all staff who work on the ground floor - essentially most of the general duties - to pack up and head to the AFP headquarters at the Edmund Barton Building.
The City Station uniformed police staff - which includes the Territory Targeting Team that patrols the busy city and Braddon entertainment districts on rotational shifts - can't be dispersed among the other four stations because they, too, are all at capacity.
And the City teams need to be close to their patrol zone and have all the equipment and facilities that shift-working operational cops require, such as firearm lockers and reinforced unloading bays, uniform lockers, changing rooms and showers.
Restrictive parking at Barton, however, will be a nightmare for multiple police operational vehicles so that issue will to be resolved within the next week.
Deputy Commissioner Gaughan's long-held view is the solution should be a combined new City Police Station, ACT watch house and headquarters, with the lock-up and the station on the ground floor, and the administration offices above it.
The location for such a multi-purpose building - with very specialised facilities - will be tricky for the ACT government, which has been saddled with maintenance of a plethora of older Menzies-era public buildings, many of which have the complication of a heritage listing, making their extensive renovation complicated and expensive.
And there are some non-negotiables: the alternative station/headquarters/watch house has to be both reasonably close to the ACT courts, the ACT Legislative Assembly and be sizeable enough to fit a new watch house, "future-proofed" for a much bigger Canberra population.
