BLYN — The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe will celebrate the completion of a public safety and justice center on Friday.
The process to obtain the new facility began in 2016. Tribal officials wanted to better provide for the security and safety of people of the tribal area, and to give their law and justice operations staffs a proper facility after having worked out of old council chambers and extra administrative offices.
The facility on Sophus Road will be officially opened in a blessing and ribbon cutting ceremony at 1 p.m. Friday.
At the groundbreaking ceremony in May 2018, tribal chairman Ron Allen said that it would be a “nice, new facility that will be a great complement to the Jamestown campus.”
According to the tribe, the 6,000-square-foot facility that took a little over a year to complete cost $2.6 million — a sum that includes a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community development block grant program for native tribes.
The primary departments in the new facility include enforcement offices housing three Jamestown Enforcement officers (including tribal Chief of Police Rory Kallappa) and a Clallam County Sheriff deputy.
The enforcement offices will include a training room for defensive tactics and judgmental use of firearms training using an advanced shooting simulation system.
The center will include a fully-appointed courtroom that can also be converted into a classroom, conference room or emergency operations center as needed.
One of the main goals of the courtroom, according to a tribal document released ahead of the center’s opening, is to take tribe-related Family Court cases in-house instead of being handled by Clallam County Superior Court as they are now.
There is more work to do with the Tribal Code, staff training, and working out formal agreements with the county and state, but the tribe is hoping to add that aspect to their judiciary process alongside their existing fish and game enforcement and treaty resource violation programs, according to a Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe press release.
Private interview rooms will be used for conducting police interviews or testimony purposes, and will be available for other jurisdictions to use as needed, the tribe said.
Additionally, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe and Healthy Families of Clallam County (HFCC) have successfully collaborated on an OCVA Tribal Set-Aside Grant that has allowed development of a satellite Children’s Advocacy Center within the new Jamestown Public Safety and Justice Center. This satellite will fall under the umbrella of HFCC’s nationally accredited CAC.
“This is a huge step in the right direction to making streamlined family-friendly services available to child victims of domestic violence/child abuse and neglect/sexual violence and their non-offending family and care-givers,” said Becca Korby, HFCC executive director.
“It is an honor to be a part of this and we are extending a warm invitation to all of you to participate in the ribbon-cutting and blessing of this new facility,” she said.
“This is a golden opportunity to see the new facility and see how this can help our community work cohesively to streamline and enhance investigation and prosecution of these terrible crimes, increasing perpetrator accountability, while caring for the smallest victims and their families.”
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Conor Dowley is a reporter with the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which is composed of Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette and Forks Forum. Reach him at cdowley@sequimgazette.com.
