Peninsula Daily News news sources
OROVILLE — The U.S. Border Patrol will begin work at a $15 million, 22-acre complex outside of Oroville next summer.
Agents and support staff work out of a small office in downtown Oroville, near where U.S. Highway 97 ends at the Canadian border in the eastern Cascades.
Their new office building will be about the same size as the entire 16,800-foot lot they now occupy.
And they’ll have two other huge buildings — a heated garage for patrol vehicles and a training and boarding facility for its horses, ATVs and K-9s used in the agency’s patrol of the border.
It’s part of a Department of Homeland Security building program that’s also constructing Border Patrol stations in the former Eagles lodge building in Port Angeles as well as in Colville in northeast Washington and Bonners Ferry, Idaho.
The Colville station, about 40 miles south of where U.S. 395 ends at the border, will cover 12 acres, with buildings for offices, training, detainee processing and holding areas, storage, enclosed parking, maintenance, canine program, horse stalls, and equestrian training, according to the contractor, PCL Constructors Inc.
Oroville agents use horses, boats, ATVs, snowmobiles and a fleet of vehicles to patrol about 80 miles of land border from the Pacific Crest Trail to just inside Okanogan County’s border with Ferry County, where the Colville station takes over.
The Oroville station was established in 1924, and in 1934 it merged with the nearby Toroda Creek and Molson stations. Over the years, it moved to different locations, and has been in its current site since 1972.
In Port Angeles, Homeland Security is renovating the former 19,000-square-foot Eagles lodge on U.S. 101 and Penn streets east of downtown for the five-acre North Olympic Peninsula headquarters in a $5.7 million project contracted to Blackhawk Constructors LLC of San Antonio.
The installation is expected to include offices, a fitness center, dog kennels, dog runs, a training room, an emergency generator, above-ground fuel storage tanks, temporary holding cells, a security system, a 40-foot radio tower and tall, downward-pointing, 24-hour lighting.
Border Patrol officials said they have outgrown their present quarters at the Richard B. Anderson Federal Building at 138 W. First St. in the heart of downtown Port Angeles.