Riviera Beach officials broke ground Friday on a new police complex planned for the site of the old Barracuda Bay aquatic facility, bringing a years-long relocation saga for the city's police department one step closer to a permanent home. The project at 1621 W. Blue Heron Blvd. is set to include a 45,000-square-foot administration building, a 26,000-square-foot storage and evidence warehouse, and an eight-lane firing range. More than 100 people turned out for the ceremony, but one key detail was missing from the day's festivities: nobody said what it will cost.
According to CBS12, the crowd that gathered for Friday's groundbreaking included city and police officials along with construction partners. Coby Kiess, president of CORE Construction Services of Florida, laid out the specifics of the planned complex, which replaces the shuttered Barracuda Bay pool with a facility built specifically for law enforcement operations. CORE was one of three firms an evaluation committee shortlisted for the project back in 2024, alongside ANF Group Inc. and Kaufman Lynn Construction Inc., according to a city project update memo.
A Department Working Out of Temporary Quarters
Riviera Beach Police Chief Michael Coleman said the complex would support both the department and the community it serves, per the same CBS12 account of Friday's event. State Rep. Jervonte “Tae” Edmonds told the outlet the new complex would finally give officers a permanent home after years of operating out of temporary quarters. That displacement dates back to the department's move from 600 West Blue Heron Boulevard to a temporary facility at 2051 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, as documented in the city's own project memo.
The department's interim arrangements have carried real costs of their own. Riviera Beach police signed a four-year lease for a temporary location at Port Center in April, according to WPBF. The station's report on that lease also estimated the eventual headquarters project would run around $30 million — a figure that stands in contrast to other publicly reported numbers for the same project.
Conflicting Price Tags Still Unresolved
Just how much the police complex will ultimately cost remains genuinely unclear, and Friday's groundbreaking did nothing to settle it. The city did not provide the project's cost or an expected completion date in the information shared at the event, CBS12 reported. That silence follows a string of inconsistent figures floated over the past couple of years: the Palm Beach Post previously reported the headquarters was expected to cost between $40 million and $50 million, while the city's Capital Projects Plan for 2026-2030 lists $33,388,256 as the total project cost, funded through capital bonds of the same amount, according to the city's own five-year plan. That same planning document states that Riviera Beach voters approved $35 million in general-obligation bonds to finance the new construction.
The capital plan also describes the facility as roughly 42,000 square feet, a figure that does not line up neatly with the separate 45,000-square-foot administration building and 26,000-square-foot warehouse cited at Friday's groundbreaking. Riviera Beach's request for qualifications for the project went out in September 2023 and drew submissions from five contractor teams, per the city's project update memorandum, setting in motion the lengthy procurement process that led to Friday's ceremony.
Lawsuit Loomed Over the Site for Months
Before any shovel hit dirt, the project faced a legal challenge from a Riviera Beach resident who sued to block demolition of the Barracuda Bay pool to make way for the police headquarters, CBS12 reported. A judge dismissed that lawsuit, after which the city's Planning and Zoning Board reheard the full site-plan presentation using a corrected address, according to Stet News. The board ultimately approved the site plan on a 4-1 vote, with member Rafer Williams dissenting without explanation, the outlet reported. The Riviera Beach City Council had unanimously passed the site plan on first reading on May 20, clearing a path toward Friday's groundbreaking.
Even with construction now underway, the information shared at Friday's event did not address the lawsuit's current status, CBS12 noted. For a department that has spent years working out of borrowed space while the legal and financial details of its future home remained in flux, the groundbreaking marks visible progress — even as basic questions about price and timeline stay unanswered.
