‘A beautiful place’—Highway Patrol begins move to Boulder

Montana’s top law enforcement agency will soon call Boulder home, but not quite as soon as originally planned: The Montana Highway Patrol’s ongoing transition from Helena to the North Campus of the former Montana Developmental Center is expected to be complete by early August, pushed back from late June.

The delay is partially to allow time for the campus’ administration building—the centerpiece of the new headquarters—to be updated to meet Federal Bureau of Investigation standards for facilities that handle criminal justice records, according to Special Operations Commander Sgt. Jay Nelson, who is a spokesman for the Highway Patrol. But the agency is also grappling with the same pandemic-related shortages of supplies and labor that plague projects public and private across the country, he said.

“Trying to line up those contractors is pretty tough,” Nelson said, adding that much of the work being done to ready the building is cosmetic improvement, including interior painting and new flooring—work that is also affected by the construction crunch. By mid-June, see-through barriers had yet to be installed in a wooden framework built atop the administration building’s front counter, and many of the facility’s rooms housed debris piles—vestiges of the MDC.