Commercial Confidential: CMPD Eastway Division

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CHARLOTTE – Before the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department opened its new Eastway Division headquarters on Central Avenue, police in the East Side precinct were working out of a strip mall.

And the city’s code enforcement team was working elsewhere in the city.

But with the completion of the $8 million CMPD Eastway Division headquarters, at 3505 Central Ave., police officers and the code enforcement officials that oversee that part of town will be sharing the hallways of the new building. It’s an effort by the city to put code enforcement officials in areas in which they work with police in order to more efficiently handle problems, said Patrick Mumford, the city’s Neighborhood and Business Services director.

This will be the model for future CMPD stations, the city says.

Mumford said that police and code enforcement employees can often collaborate on problem properties, and that it was difficult for them to do that in separate offices.

“We really looked at ways to combine Neighborhood and Business Services activities,” he said. “Not just to co-locate, but it’s really to be able to bump into each other in the hallways and see what issues they can work collaboratively on.”

Mumford gave the example of a nuisance property, either residential or commercial, to show how the two teams can work together. When police get a call reporting a problem at a property, they go out and address the public-safety aspect of the issue, Mumford said. But if police detect code violations that caused the issue, they can tell the code enforcement team, which has the responsibility of handing out code enforcement citations and requiring changes to the buildings, he said.

Building police headquarters with room for code enforcement employees is the new standard of how future police headquarters in Charlotte will be planned. Code enforcement doesn’t need space at each individual station, but Mumford said he’d like to have a presence in each quadrant of the city.

Construction started in May on the 14,626-square-foot Eastway Division headquarters, right after the city pulled build building permits, valued at about $5.4 million, for work on the project, according to county records.

At the time, Darryl Kellough, principal of Charlotte-based Southside Constructors, the general contractor on the project, said construction was slated to wrap up in 330 days from May 20 and he wasn’t far off, despite unusually bad weather last year.

The largest permit, worth about $5.24 million, was for work on the 14,626-square-foot division office building, while the other permit was for work on a 1,232-square-foot storage building, county records show.

CMPD’s Eastway Division patrols a 10.2-square-mile range, which includes the Central Avenue corridor, Plaza-Midwood, Charlotte Country Club and the Eastland Mall area, according to the CMPD website. CMPD estimates the population in the Eastway Division is 44,285.

The Eastway Division headquarters was the first station to house code enforcement employees, and Mumford said the next station that will house them is the West Boulevard headquarters, which will be built near the West Boulevard intersection with Old Steele Creek Road. Design is underway on that project, but construction has not started, he said.

Project name: Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Eastway Division headquarters

Address: 3505 Central Ave., Charlotte

About the building: CMPD and city code enforcement are sharing the 14,626-square-foot building, which is replacing the old Eastway Division station that was on Eastway Drive.

Cost: $8 million

Contractor: Southside Constructors

Construction started: May 2013

Completion date: June