Southbank Police Station given the green light

The new Southbank Police Station at 66-76 Moray St is expected to be in operation by March 2016 after State Treasury officially signed off on the building’s lease last month.

After the site’s location was revealed in the May edition of Southbank Local News, members of St Kilda Rd Police Station have been awaiting an official green light from the State Government to formally sign the lease.

The new double-storey station will replace St Kilda Rd Police Station, which currently responds to the zone covering Southbank, South Wharf and Fishermans Bend.

According to St Kilda Rd Police Station commander Snr Sgt Steve Bills, the tenders for construction are close to being finalised and building is due to start this month.

“As far as I understand, they’ve got the plans and so the bottom floor will be all about the police station itself and the upstairs will all be administrative,” he said.

“There’s not a lot of work that they have to do upstairs, there’s a lot of work that they have to do on the ground floor. There’s some security work that they need to do on the actual building itself and that will all be a part of it.”

“It should be open at the end of March because they indicated that it would involve approximately three months building work.”

With the lease of the current building at 412 St Kilda Rd due to finish in July next year, Snr Sgt Bills said Victoria Police and the State Government had been keen to relocate the station to a site that was more appropriate to its response zone.

“Our response zone for St Kilda Rd is a bit of a banana shape and a large part is from City Rd to the river and all the way through Fishermans Bend as well as Southbank itself,” he said.

“Some 70 per cent of our work comes from Southbank roughly and so having us here is a much better location from a point of view of where our workload actually comes from.”

“When you consider the future demographic projections of Fishermans Bend having up to 80,000 people in another 20 years then it makes sense to have a station here.”

While the new station will only initially house the uniform branch, Snr Sgt Bills said the building was large enough to potentially accommodate more units in the future.

“At this stage it’s just the uniform branch coming in here but there’s certainly the room to have extra units here so we may end up with some additional support units in here as well but that will be a decision for the superintendent to make,” he said.