At a recent meeting, Milford City Council approved a bid from Shore Built Construction for $98,000 for police evidence building behind the station. Although the majority of the cost of the building is covered by grant funding, the approval is for any additional costs that are incurred in the construction.
“Shore Built Construction came in as the lowest bid,” Chief Cecilia Ashe said. “I’d also like to personally recognize the city clerk’s office and finance. I often say this, but this is probably one of the most well-functioning governments I have worked for, and this is just an example of where collaboration and teamwork can produce a good product.”
Lou Vitola, Finance Director, explained that the city had received bond bill funding for the project.
“It is one of my favorite kinds of grants because it’s something we already recognized as a need, it was approved by council and budgeted out of general fund reserves,” Vitola said. “We applied for bond bill funding and were denied at the start of Fiscal 26, but then the bond bill committee was reallocating prior year projects that did not go through in other communities and asked us if we wanted $98,000. Of course, we said yes. So, this project will truly restore the $98,000 in the general fund. I strongly recommend that council approve the chief’s request.”
When bids went out for the new police station, one of the alternate bids was police evidence building. It was an alternate as then-Mayor Archie Campbell wanted to keep the cost of the new station under $17 million, although a referendum passed by voters would have allowed the city to issue $20 million in bonds.
“When we met a few months ago, we were talking primarily about hard construction costs,” Mike Svaby, then-Director of Public Works, said. “The mayor made it clear that we aren’t going to change course and have a project that was above and beyond what was put out to the constituency earlier. So, we went back and reviewed all the specifics of design.”
At the time the additional building was listed as an alternate cost, then-Chief Kenneth Brown cautioned council that the building should be part of the initial construction.
“I want to go on record as saying that the mobile storage, which is our evidence storage, while we can work out other ways of reducing that to eliminate it, I don’t think it is an option,” Chief Brown said. “We need to do something there. I think we are running in bare bones as it is. We didn’t account for a place to store our ammo inside this building because we were planning on putting it in the outside building. So, this building doesn’t have a lot of storage space in it. I think we were counting on a lot of things being outside.”
After Ashe became chief, she pushed for the new evidence building as the city was no longer compliant with state regulations regarding evidence. Currently, the police department has no way to store a vehicle after a fatal accident, and the state no longer stores them for municipalities. Delaware State Police used to handle fatal accidents in city limits, but they are now handled by Milford. These changes at the state level made the building critical.
Council approved the bid unanimously. There was no discussion about when the building would be completed. The bids can be viewed on the city website.
