Police cannot wait five years for the ACT government to fund a new city station when the existing one was no longer "fit for purpose", the police representative body has said.
The updated infrastructure plan published by the government on Tuesday revealed that a new city police station and a new ACT Policing headquarters, replacing the Winchester Police Centre at Belconnen, were both in forward projections.
Both were likely to be merged into one, combined future project.
The plan indicated this project would cost up to $250 million and take five years to deliver. It showed the government would consider funding the works, which are currently in an "early planning" stage, sometime in the next 10 years.
But the body that represents the ACT and federal rank and file police says this project needed to be fast-tracked because the station was "falling down around the police officers and support staff who work there, and a new police station is required urgently".
"If city police station was permanently closed tomorrow, what would the ACT government do to redistribute police resources and maintain the same level of response capabilities?" federal police association president Alex Caruana said.
Chief Police Officer Neil Gaughan has ordered his general duties officers and other ground-floor staff out of the city station from Wednesday and to redeploy to the AFP headquarters in the Edmund Barton building while repair crews go in and patch up the leaky, heritage-listed London Circuit building, which was built in 1966 and has the multi-cell ACT Watch House co-located in its basement.
Watch House and front office staff remain on site, as do teams of detectives in the upper floors, which were less affected by the water ingress.
The AFP headquarters is the only building that can accommodate the extra officers and provide them with the operational support they need, including secure equipment and handgun lockers, and gun unloading bays.
Mr Caruana said his members fully backed the Deputy Commissioner's call on the poor state of the city station.
"It follows that if you're designing a new city police station, you would also need to look at a new ACT Watch House and where it is located, and how it is operated and managed," he said.
One proposal strongly supported by the association is to hand the running of the Watch House over to ACT Corrections because the facility's role is largely custodial management.
A small number of police could be on site to process those charged, prepare court briefs and secure any forensics material.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr flagged the potential for police to be accommodated in a leased, privately constructed city building and "this is one alternative that would need to be analysed".
