The old public safety building once served as a school before becoming the headquarters for the Ocean City Police Department.
The demolition contract for Ocean City’s public safety building will have to be put out to bid again pending the completion of environmental inspections for the nearly 150-year-old structure.
In order to provide accurate bids, demolition contractors need to know if they’ll have to address potential environmental issues such as asbestos contamination. This information was not included in the initial request for proposals, city spokesman Doug Bergen said Thursday.
Originally, demolition bids were scheduled to be opened on Tuesday, but the process has been delayed pending completion of the environmental inspections. A new bid date will be announced once the inspections are completed, Bergen said.
The city is moving ahead to demolish the antiquated red-brick structure to make way for construction of a new public safety building on the same spot at 835 Central Ave.
The tentative schedule is to complete the design for the new building in May. At that point, the city will develop the estimated cost of the project. Construction would begin before the end of the year, with completion before the summer of 2028, Bergen said.
In a separate project, Ocean City is in the final stages of building a new $6.1 million police substation at Eighth Street and the Boardwalk. The police department is expected to move into the substation in February, Police Chief Bill Campbell said.
The substation will give the police department a bigger presence on the Boardwalk and will serve as a temporary police headquarters while construction is done on the new public safety building.
“The facility is a great new addition that will help keep our Boardwalk and all of Ocean City safe,” Mayor Jay Gillian said of the project in a statement.
Once the existing public safety building is torn down, the site will be used for 66 temporary parking spaces during the busy summer tourism season, before construction is started on the new police headquarters, Gillian said.
The building dates to 1884, according to a sign in front. A sign on the front of the public safety building says the three-story structure dates to 1884. At that age, the building opened just five years after Ocean City’s founding in 1879 by four Methodist ministers as a Christian seaside resort.
The building began as a school in the late 1800s before transitioning into its current iteration as the police headquarters.
The public safety building dominates the block of Central Avenue between Eighth and Ninth streets.
Over the last few years, Gillian and members of City Council have debated different plans for the public safety building.
Gillian had once flirted with the idea of developing an entirely new public safety building that would combine the operations of the police and fire departments. He backed off after Council balked at the estimated $42 million price for a new building.
Attention then shifted to plans to modernize and expand the antiquated public safety building at an estimated cost of $30 million to $35 million.
But later, the city considered buying the century-old former Crown Bank building downtown for $12.6 million to serve as a new police headquarters. However, the city did not move forward with the purchase of the old Crown Bank in September after deciding it would be too expensive to renovate it.
With the former Crown Bank no longer an option, the city decided to build a new police headquarters instead of trying to modernize the public safety building or renovating another facility.
Construction of a new public safety building for the police department and municipal court will be funded with the help of the $30 million that was set aside to refurbish the police station.
Ocean City's $6.1 million police substation is under construction overlooking the Boardwalk at Eighth Street.
