A few days before Thanksgiving in 2001, the Olmsted County Sheriff’s Department, in collaboration with the Rochester fire and police departments, announced their plan to create Minnesota’s first regional public safety training center.
It was to be located near the National Guard Armory in southeast Rochester, and construction on the first of three phases was to begin in 2002.
The only potential hitch was that the project needed $1.5 million in bonding money from the state to get things rolling. That money, of course, was far from a sure thing, and in a P-B story Nov. 21, 2001, Sheriff Steve Borchardt said "If we do not get that money ... we’ll have to go back and figure out why it didn’t pass and go back to the drawing board."
More than six years and several drawing boards later, it’s quite appropriate that funding for the training center arrived before Borchardt left the sheriff’s department. He’s been one of the project’s biggest supporters and cheerleaders, and although the first yard of concrete has yet to be poured, at least now he’ll depart knowing that his effort and patience weren’t in vain.
But Job-like patience shouldn’t have been necessary, not for a project that perfectly matches the true intent of the state bonding process. The training center — located east of Fleet Farm, rather than near the Armory — will not have Rochester or Olmsted County as its central focus; rather, it will train police officers, K-9 teams, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters who will serve all areas of Minnesota. The return on the state’s $3.65 million investment is likely to be in the form of criminals apprehended, property protected and lives saved in every corner of the state.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sure, Rochester will gain some construction jobs and perhaps some full-time staff at the facility, but that’s more than a fair trade-off for the $3.25 million that Olmsted County is kicking in for the project.
Here’s hoping that the next time a project of this caliber lands on the desks of legislators and the governor, it doesn’t take six years for everyone to recognize its obvious merits.
