It’s been a project nearly 20 years in the making — now, Wilton’s new police headquarters is finally within reach.
“We’re really close to something monumental for this police department and the town,” Wilton Police Chief Tom Conlan said in mid-July, as he and Deputy Chief Rob Cipolla walked GOOD Morning Wilton through the still-under-construction building that, in just a few months, will become the new heart of Wilton’s public safety operations.
At 19,000 sq. ft. — nearly double the size of the current 51-year-old facility — the new headquarters was designed from the ground up with intention, safety and operational efficiency in mind. It’s features reflect a vision of modern policing that officials say is both high-tech and human-centered.
The project began with a space needs assessment in 2012, followed by a study committee formed in 2016, and building committee in 2018.
“You lose track of all those years, all the planning… countless hours of building committee meetings twice a month, and the seven members of that committee who spent countless hours and all the work by the architects and the Board of Selectmen to get us where we are now,” Conlan said. “It’s quite amazing feat. I’m glad it’s only gonna hopefully happen only once in my career.”
Built for Modern Policing — and the Future
At the rear of the new building, a drive-through double vehicle bay replaces the crowded multi-purpose garage bay areas in the old building. One side will be dedicated to processing vehicular evidence.
“We get stolen cars or cars used in felonies… you have to have a secure area that you pull the car in, that you can lock it down, no one else can touch it,” Conlan explained. “You process it for fingerprints or DNA… [it’s a big win investigatively.”
The other side allows secure suspect drop-off directly into the booking area — a major upgrade from the current process, which sometimes required escorting detainees through public areas.
But design improvements go far beyond size. Cipolla said the new layout also allows emergency medical care to be delivered with privacy and security. “If a prisoner has a medical episode … Quite often we’ll arrest somebody, and they’ll either have a medication issue or some kind of reaction, anxiety to being arrested… Quite often we have to pull an ambulance in.”
Thoughtful Design Supporting Safety and Solid Police Work
The new booking and detention area was designed to improve safety and workflow. In the old building, the booking area was used for everything from detaining arrestees, to fingerprinting members of the public, and even victim interviews. Now it will be task-specific.
“In our current facility, detectives would secure someone [first in booking or the cell], but then have to walk them through the rest of the building into the interview room in the detective bureau,” Cipolla said.
Now, the new building will allow a suspect to be processed and kept in the space meant solely for this task with an interview room within booking.
Three modern, ADA-compliant holding cells allow for proper separation of adults and juveniles. “If we arrest somebody that may be wheelchair-bound or has a disability, this building can facilitate that,” Conlan said. “There’s a room between the [outer] room and the cell so so it creates that buffer, so someone here can’t hear someone there.”
The jail cell doors are more modern versions made from thick steel rather than sliding bars, with pass-through spaces to safely hand a prisoner a meal, as well as complex wiring and electrical work integrated within.
“The doors need to be controlled from the dispatch center. We need to know if they’re open or closed, if we need to buzz an officer in, if something’s going on, their hands need to be free,” Conlan said.
Safety systems have also been brought up to code — including fire alarms and sprinklers. “The old building had none of that,” Conlan said.
Safety in the larger sense is also why it takes a longer time to construct.
“Most buildings will just have metal or wood framing. Here they’re all steel doors and it’s a full cinderblock building because it’s got to be resistant to tornadoes, hurricanes — it’s the one building in town that can’t be affected by that,” Conlan added.
A Real-Time Hub for Public Safety
The new dispatch center is a symbol of the increasingly technical nature of modern policing. Miles of wires run throughout the building, connecting back to the dispatch hub; there are multiple screens throughout the space including six large TV screens surrounding the top of the room and up to eight monitors at each desk station.
“We wanted to try and mirror some of the real-time crime centers you’d see in New Haven or Hartford or Bridgeport — not as big as those, but some of those complexities …[and] that functionality,” Conlan said.
“Crime has gotten a lot more technical. It’s not just people breaking into houses anymore — it’s a lot more fraud. We have to get more technical as well. Now we expect our dispatchers do a lot more than they did, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago, they monitor more public-facing cameras,” Conlan said.
The technology supporting the technology has been upgraded too. Conlan said that the HVAC for the old building’s dispatch center dates back 20 years — and required a search on eBay for a part to keep it running.
“It’s nice for our officers, and especially our dispatchers that work in a room like this, to know they’re appreciated,” Conlan added. “It’s nice to see the investment, not only in the dispatch center, but also in our employees.”
A Building That Serves the Public, Too
The new lobby will be welcoming and functional, with a waiting area featuring a memorabilia display case, a TV monitor, access to the records department, an elevator to offices upstairs — all outside the secured zone in the back.
An upgraded public interview room offers more privacy. “We’ll be able to do public fingerprinting here — pistol permits, job applicants, school employees — and never have to enter the secure area,” Cipolla noted.
The other important feature that wasn’t available in the old building — public restrooms.
“You’d be surprised how many times at nine o’clock on a Sunday night someone will come in with their kids and say, ‘Hey, you guys have a bathroom we could use.’ It’s like, ‘No, we don’t,’” Conlan said. “So that will be nice.”
A new 40-person multi-purpose meeting room will host group training classes, meetings and Emergency Operations Center activity — and made available for outside community use if necessary. It has it’s own high-tech features as well, including SMART Board technology, integrated A/V, in-floor wiring and workstations with ethernet ports.
It also gives Wilton a better platform for crisis response.
“When we have… a big hurricane … and people without power for a week or two, when you have Eversource in here, to be able to pull up those screens and see hot spots in town and what needs to be fixed. It’s good to be able to get everybody in a room, partners like Eversource and Frontier here… it’s only going to make the town more efficient to work through those disasters,” Conlan said.
More Space Makes Better Police Work
Many of the most important upgrades are out of public view, with extra space and a smarter layout, all improving the way Wilton police do their jobs every day.
A new dedicated evidence receiving area replaces the department’s previous “makeshift” setup tucked into shared spaces. Officers bring any evidence, log it in and hand it over to the property officers — an improvement in the security, chain of custody and procedure.
“We have two property officers. They’re the only ones that have access to the evidence room, so they’re responsible for the intake of the evidence, the custody of it, the release of it,” Cipolla said.
Chief Conlan added, “Even the chief can’t get into the evidence room.”
The second floor is also well planned. Now the department will have a dedicated briefing room where officers and sergeants meet before shifts.
There’s also a new lab area, which includes a drying rack and modern professional tools for developing evidence — tools that, until now, the department had to improvise.
A dedicated exhaust-vented space provides a place for officers to clean their department-issued weapons, something that’s routine but was previously jammed into other shared areas.
Other spaces will now support investigative work in more functional ways. Officers trained in computer investigations — currently working out of a “little nook down in the armory” — will now have a dedicated office. The detective unit and school resource officers will also have a larger, centralized space and an adjoining interview room.
Even the simple need to storing accident reconstruction equipment — which includes survey gear that needs constant charging — will now be possible thanks to powered shelving racks in dedicated storage rooms.
Prioritizing Health, Wellness and Community
One of the most welcome upgrades is the addition of a proper gym and wellness space. In a job where physical and mental health are so closely linked, both Conlan and Cipolla said the facility will go a long way toward showing officers they’re valued.
“Officer wellness — it’s one of the biggest things,” Conlan said. “Physical fitness and wellness go hand in hand with mental wellness… It’s important for officers to have their own space.”
“You want our officers to be healthy and fit so that they can do the job as a police officer, but also for their personal lives beyond their work here,” Cipolla said.
Beyond the gym, the facility makes good on promises of upgraded working conditions for all staff — especially in the expanded locker rooms which offer proper storage, ventilation and privacy.
“There’s 60 lockers [in all]… It’s enough room for growth,” Conlan said. “Right now we have five female officers. If we ever have more than 10, we have that ability.”
Natural light was another priority, especially in interior offices. “We made it so there’s windows up above that catch that light coming from those windows on the hallway,” Conlan said.
Thoughtful detail carries over into every inch: a dedicated break room with a full kitchen; a new report room with workstations instead of hallway desks; and individual offices for senior officers who’ve spent years working in cramped or shared quarters but are now getting something commensurate with the work they’ve done over years for Wilton.
Ready for the Move
The plan for transition into the new building is already well underway.
“We’ve been working on [this] for over a year — trying to thin out some of the physical records… based off the State Library and what needs to be kept and what doesn’t,” Conlan said.
Staff will transfer personal files and furniture, and other town departments including Public Works or Parks and Recreation, will assist with larger equipment.
The most complex part of the transition will be the dispatch center. “We’ll move down to Norwalk for either an eight-hour or 24-hour period,” Conlan explained. “That’s when the radio equipment, dispatch monitors, and some of the computer equipment will be moved over,” he said, adding that all phone calls for that brief period will be routed to Norwalk. “Functionally, it’s pretty much the same.”
Checking Every Box
Conlan and Cipolla are grateful for the years of persistence and community support. “If you went through all of the stuff that we wanted in this new building… we’ve checked every box,” Conlan said.
The project has been a long time coming. “I first remember in 2012 sitting in [former] Chief [Michael] Lombardo’s office, doing a space [assessment]… probably when I was a patrol officer,” Conlan recalled. “There’s been many chiefs before and after us that have worked on this.”
And now, as the paint dries, the tiles set and the technology gets installed, the new building stands as a symbol of the town’s commitment to public safety — and to the people who serve it every day.
“Townspeople — thank you for coming out and voting for this,” Conlan said. “And all the countless hours the building committee put into it… It’s really appreciated.”