Starting this spring, personnel from Bowling Green’s police and fire departments will complete their training under one roof as construction on the city’s joint police and fire training center is expected to wrap up in the next couple of months.

David Hehner, facilities manager for Bowling Green Public Works, said construction is currently set to wrap up in the spring, with police and fire personnel expected to move in shortly thereafter.

“It’s going to make it … more convenient, easier to go through the training process and hopefully help us build police and fire to a better point than we are even at this point,” Hehner said. “There’s always room to grow, and we’re trying to make it to where as we grow, we can do it as painlessly as possible.”

The $16 million project is along Porter Pike and will replace the aging Northside Fire Station No. 5, which was built in 1987.

Construction on the center was impeded in the summer of 2023 after several sinkholes opened up on the property, forcing the city to make several hundred thousand dollars worth of changes to the plan.

Hehner said after this hiccup though, the project started moving ahead smoothly.

“This building will be around for 50 years, hopefully,” Hehner said. “It’s unfortunate, but … we got to keep everybody safe, and we owe it to the taxpayers to do it correctly.”

Bowling Green Police Chief Michael Delaney said while BGPD currently conducts training for new officers at its station, the amount of personnel inside has the department “busting at the seams.”

“We would host more and get more curriculums approved if we had the facilities right now to offer those classes,” Delaney said. “But trying to do two basic training academies a year, which is 22 weeks, and then trying to plug in some of those in service classes, and then on top of the ongoing training that we do for officers, we just don’t have any more room to do it.”

Basic training for officers has been happening locally since 2020, Delaney said. Before this, new officers were sent to a training facility in Richmond for around five months.

He said the distance and time involved meant for some officers, like single parents, working at the department was out of reach.

“That was a hurdle for a lot of people,” Delaney said.

Current training includes firearm instruction, de-escalation techniques and driving, which is done at the National Corvette Museum’s NCM Motorsports Park.

The chief said in order to maintain basic certification, officers must have at least 40 hours of training each year. Once the new facility fires up, Delaney said his department would be able to add more classes and get more curriculum approved for those classes.

The benefit of having training done locally is that officers can learn what Delaney calls “the Bowling Green way.”

“We’re able to teach them … the way that we want them to interact with our citizens, the court systems that we have here, the local resources that we have, our partnerships with nonprofits,” Delaney said. “All of the training is developed around serving Bowling Green.”

Speaking on the merits of training under one roof with BGFD, Delaney said the citizens of Bowling Green stand to benefit since several aspects of the departments’ instruction and emergency responses overlap.

He cited the Dec. 11, 2021, tornadoes as an example.

“We worked hand in hand with the fire department through all of that,” he said. “So being under one roof and being able to collaborate and share some training ideas and thoughts, I think it’s the best thing for our citizens.”

Fire Chief Justin Brooks echoed Delaney’s sentiment, saying the folks in his department “don’t see anything but positives.”

Like the police department, Bowling Green Fire has seen its enrollment ramp up in recent years, with 15 firefighters currently in this year’s training class.

“This facility will allow us to spread out and have the room needed to have big recruit classes,” Brooks said, adding that the facility would make it possible for the department to conduct some trainings with BGPD, like active shooter training.