Old Napier and Hastings police stations to be demolished for parking

Police Eastern District commander Superintendent Tania Kura at the entrance to the new headquarters and Hastings station. Photo / Doug Laing

The old Napier and Hastings police stations will be demolished by the end of the year and replaced by parking areas.

A timeline for the demolition of the stations, replaced in Napier by a new station which opened in December 2016 and in Hastings by a new station and police Eastern District headquarters which opened six weeks ago, has been confirmed by police Eastern District commander Superintendent Tania Kura.

It comes as the boss, previously based in Napier since arriving as Hawke's Bay Area commander in mid-2012 and through her appointment as Eastern District commander in July 2017, settled in to her new office in the three-storey complex on the corner of Railway Rd and Eastbourne St, Hastings.

She has a smallish office, certainly nothing of the expanse one might expect of someone in charge of over 200 people working in the building, and well over 400 in the district extending about 330km from Porangahau in the south to East Cape in the north.

It's a workable office in context with the design of the open-plan spaces where very few have their own desks or office, replaced by multi-user hot-desks and locker rooms, with smaller rooms mainly for such things as interview rooms or particularly specialised parts of in-station police work.

The rear view from upstairs is one of the old station, its yards and the cellblock which had been targeted-up as the Hawke's Bay Police holding-cell facility pending decision on what "custodial facilities" should look and be like in the future, possibly not even on the site.

The new stations will be the bases for up to 260 sworn and 36 non-sworn staff in Hastings — based on the number of lockers installed — and, as she stresses, about 100 in Napier.

In Waipukurau police are embarking on sharing some of the station space with other Government departments - Corrections and Social Development - but no changes are envisaged for the Wairoa, Flaxmere and Maraenui community policing centres, the area dog patrol base between the two cities, and the sole-charge stations.

Demolition of the old stations, which were both opened in the 1960s, will start in Napier on February 24 and in Hastings on April 16.

According to staff from the Police, the old Napier station opened in 1962, replacing the first station in Byron St, which had been in use more than 80 years, and the Hastings station was the town and city's third, opened in 1968.

By the end of the year the old station sites will be the parking for most of the Hawke's Bay police vehicle fleet of over 90, including the country's first Mobile Police Base, which was introduced in October.