Crime

A new Public Safety Facility currently being built in Manassas is currently on schedule by its completion date of September 2022.

A video posted on Twitter by Manassas City Police Chief Douglass Keen updated the new $49.1 million facilities located at 9608 Grant Avenue. In the short video, Keen is standing on what will become the facility's fourth floor while describing what will be the new home of the city's police department. 

The new 68,000 square foot facility will be the new home of the Manassas police and consolidate all of the city's public safety departments. This would include the 911 and Emergency Operations Center, the Fire and Rescue Administration offices, and its Information Technology Department.

The new, four-story facility will replace the current police station at 9518 Fairview Avenue.

In 2016, Manassas paid $3.2 million for the site on which the new facility would be constructed on which had been the site of a Safeway grocery store and later on as a flea market. 

The price tag of this project has expanded over the years. In 2017, estimates showed that it would cost the city $19 million. When ground was broken in 2020, the estimated project costs were said to be $40 million.

"This building will add to the south side of the city," said Mayor Hall Parrish II during the facility's groundbreaking ceremony in 2020. During the same ceremony, then-Mayor Parrish recalled the memory of the late former city councilman Steven Randolph. "The south side, as he called it, is something he championed."

The new facility will replace the current police station at Fairview Avenue and Signal Hill Road, built in 1990. During the City Council meetings, one suggestion was that the city's school system could use the old police station after the police department had vacated it.