A ground breaking ceremony took place Wednesday for the new Esquimalt Public Safety Building.
It's on the site of the old building that housed both the fire department and police detachment. Work will get rolling next week and the new building should be complete by 2026.
"We're celebrating today because we are now breaking ground and we will be having a public safety building for our fire department in a couple of years," Mayor Barb Desjardins told C-FAX 1070.
The fire department has been operating out of temporary structures in the Archie Browning Arena parking lot and will continue to do so until construction is complete.
Mayor Desjardins says the new building will also include an emergency operations centre and some office space for the Capital Regional District. But, because of cost escalations, council scaled back the original plan. This phase of construction won't be built all the way up to Esquimalt Road and it won't include space for police. Vic-PD will instead continue to occupy the former library space under the town hall.
The decision to scale-back was made last year when the estimated budget rose by nearly 50%. The original estimate was $42 million in 2021. But, by 2023, the township received bids that would have pushed the costs over $60-millon.
Another phase of construction, fronting Esquimalt Road and including space of police, could still be in the future. Desjardins points out they're still exploring different policing models, which could in turn inform decisions on that part of the building.