September 4, 2026

By Mary Beth Gahan

The 45,000-square-foot building that houses the Flower Mound Police Department, detention facility, and municipal courts has noticeable deficiencies.

In the drying room — named for where blood-stained clothing is hung to dry before it can be logged in as evidence — a blue plastic barrel sits in the corner to collect water dripping from a light in the ceiling.

Nearby, the skunky smell of marijuana lingers in the evidence processing room. It’s even stronger in the storage room where there are 13,000 items. There isn’t proper ventilation, so employees there inhale the fumes throughout the workday.

Most of all, space is a commodity. Storage cabinets line walkways. Most closets have been turned into offices. A judge’s library doubles as an overflow women’s locker room. There is no lock on the door, so the town gave the department a white stick to place under the doorknob and jam it shut.

“I’ll give credit to building services. They’re doing the best they can for this old of a building,” Police Chief David Coulon said. “We have a lot of problems.”

The town initially studied the possibility of renovating, for the sixth time, the building that the department has called home since 2000. When that wasn’t feasible, Flower Mound purchased 19.7 acres of land off on the southern side of town for $7.5 million in February.

The town council could call for a bond election as soon as May to pay for a new facility that is estimated to cost $99 million. For now, officers are making it work with a repurposed grocery store.

In 1997, Food Lion, a mid-Atlantic grocer, closed all of its stores in Texas after declining sales because of a television news report that detailed the company’s practice of repackaging expired meat.

At the same time, the Flower Mound Police Department was looking for its own space to accommodate rapid population growth. The department, which got its start in 1974, first operated out of a trailer off Cross Timbers Road before moving to a former Town Hall.

The town purchased the vacant Food Lion building on at the corner of Cross Timbers Road and Kirkpatrick Lane in 1997 and the department moved into it in 2000.

“Their bad meat was our gain,” Assistant Police Chief Jason Hawley said.

At that time, there were 83 sworn officers and civilian staff members. There are now 145.

In the past 11 years, the town has renovated the police station five times by expanding locker rooms, increasing space in the evidence storage room, purchasing additional land for parking, and building a new training room.

The department continues to outgrow it.

Storage rooms are packed. The evidence processing room currently has boxes of honeybuns, granola bars, and tampons for inmates because the storage area in the jail was converted to two desks.

There are two conference rooms and they’re in use most of the time.

On a recent Thursday, one of two training rooms was being used to take photos for a department yearbook, the first one in decades. It’s also used for jury members when there’s a trial in the courtroom and is a polling place during early voting. Each time it’s used by an outside group, it is unavailable for the department.

“Three or four months out of the year, we don’t get to use it,” Chief Coulon said.

Half of the police vehicles outside are parked out front rather than in the back behind a locked gate. An armored SWAT vehicle that the town paid $326,000 for in 2024 gets rolled out of a garage to sit in the elements each time a car is impounded as evidence. It has to be covered to protect the ballistic glass from UV damage.

Unlike years past, there is no more property available directly adjacent to the station. So the town went looking elsewhere.

The nearly 20-acre property off Aberdeen Drive and Long Prairie Road is planned to not only be home to the new police station, detention facility, and municipal courts, but also Fire Station 3.

The public safety facility, excluding the fire station, is planned to be around 100,000 square feet. At the top of the list of needs is space for growth the department is expecting in the next few years as development on the west side of town gets built and new residents move in.

The building would be designed for police work, rather than retrofitted to accommodate it. There is a need for officers to have private conversations about sensitive investigations they’re working on, Hawley said. They’d like soft rooms for someone coming in to report a crime, rather than the interrogation rooms that are used currently.

The department hopes to add a computer forensics lab where they can process and analyze computers that are brought in as evidence, an indoor shooting range, and a sallyport capable of holding more than two vehicles since the detention facility services three cities in addition to Flower Mound.

If voters approve the proposition in a bond election and the department builds the new facility, the town will then decide what to do with the building on Kirkpatrick Lane. It is valued at $14 million, according to the Denton County Appraisal District.

Flower Mound isn’t alone in the push to build a new police station. Lewisville opened a $102 million public safety facility in June 2025. Roanoke held a ribbon cutting for its $45 million police station and municipal court in November.

Department leaders have toured other those as well as a nearly-finished one in Allen and another in Mansfield, which was designed by BRW Architects, the same company contracted to study the need for one in Flower Mound.

“We’ve looked at others and it’s day and night,” Assistant Chief Hawley said. “Day and night.”