New police board chair, Kelly Ash chooses the community over the fortress

Kelly Ash is bringing a refreshing, common-sense leadership style to the Sarnia Police Services Board, signaling a shift toward community cooperation. By rejecting costly standoffs and pivoting toward a “community build,” Ash is opening the door for Sarnia–Lambton to solve two financial crises at once.

There is a sudden, quiet shift in the air at the Sarnia Police Services Board, and it smells remarkably like common sense. For months, the conversation surrounding a new police headquarters championed by former Board Chair Paul Wiersma and Chief Derek Davis has felt like a standoff between an ego-driven fortress and a city. But the new board chair, Kelly Ash, has offered an olive branch that deserves to be taken seriously.

During the January 2026 board meeting, Ash explicitly rejected the hostile path of arbitration and expressed a desire for a "community build." "I think going into this build with division is not the right way to do it," Ash stated. She even opened the door to a "possible scale-down" and researching "secondary locations."

By moving away from the isolationist model that has defined this project, Ash has signalled that the board might finally start acting like a neighbour and looking at all the options. The timing couldn’t be better, because Sarnia–Lambton taxpayers are currently being asked to fund two separate financial disasters that happen to be perfect solutions for one another.

According to a report by County CAO Stéphane Thiffeault, Lambton taxpayers have handed over $11 million in bailouts over the last five years to keep the Sarnia–Lambton Research Park afloat. Despite this massive injection of public cash, the facility is struggling to recover from the pandemic, with current occupancy sitting at only 60% to 70%. This leaves between 86,000 and 115,000 square feet of high-tech space currently sitting empty.

The county has a massive building with tens of thousands of vacant square feet, while the police service claims a space crisis and an appetite for a massive "fortress" on the edge of town.

The solution is so obvious it’s almost painful: move the police to the Research Park.

This isn’t just about saving money; it’s about calling a bluff on the narrative of modern policing as a "special flower." The Sarnia Police Service's own project page insists that a police facility is not a "simple office building," citing the need for forensics labs and high-tech infrastructure that meets "Post-Disaster" standards.

Even more telling is the Service's argument against leasing. Their official position is that a police service is "critical municipal emergency infrastructure" that "should be on municipal land in order to avoid potential eviction (i.e. in a land sale by the owner), or lease/rent increases when moving critical infrastructure would be operationally or cost prohibitive".

Moving to the Research Park is not a traditional private lease—it is a transition into a facility owned by the County of Lambton. By relocating there, the police would fulfill their own requirement of remaining on public land, ensuring long-term security and cost control, while simultaneously ending the $11 million bailout cycle currently draining county coffers.

Yet, the Research Park is already specifically engineered for high-density, negative-pressure laboratory use. The police claim they need secure vehicle bays and tactical storage; the Park features pilot plant infrastructure with 24-foot high-bay vertical clearances. If the Research Park was robust enough for global biochemical incubators, it is more than sufficient for the police service’s servers and lockers.

Chief Derek Davis once tried to highlight the complexity of his profession by asking me in a public forum, "Nathan, what do you think is inside a police facility?". I told him, "It's a building with rooms where people sit and talk to each other and do things on computers and paperwork."

While the Chief may prefer a more mystical explanation for his architectural needs, the reality is that the high-tech, secure environment he is looking for is already waiting for him five minutes down the road in a building the public has already paid for.

The proposed 98,650-square-foot build is not actually for Sarnia’s current needs. It is predicated on a speculative regional takeover of Point Edward and Lambton County policing—a plan that would require 75 to 100 additional officers. Point Edward officials have already confirmed they were never consulted and have no intention of dissolving their independent board. Sarnia residents are being asked to fund turnkey office suites for "phantom" officers that our neighbours don't even want.

Moving specialized, back-office police functions to the Modeland Road facility would solve the county’s debt crisis and the police space crisis in one move. It would also stop the bleeding from questionable current expenses, such as the mall training lease.

Most importantly, this move would save the Christina Street station. The current headquarters only requires $4.4 million in critical repairs—a pittance compared to the massive financial commitment of a new $120 million build. If the board insists that the building is "untenable" for housing police computers and lockers, they are effectively acknowledging that it should be returned to the community. By freeing up this prime downtown site, the city gains a rare opportunity to reimagine the property entirely, transforming a restricted high-security block into a public asset that actually serves the evolving needs of our residents.

Kelly's comments give me hope—that maybe the police board can stop getting caught up in fantastical explanations and come back down to earth with the rest of us. We are a small city that has hasn't grown since we built the current police facility, with a massive empty building meeting all the requirements within a stone’s throw of where the police wanted to be anyway. If this were really about necessity, the option would be explored. Instead, I suspect the Chief will simply add another line to his website’s FAQ suggesting that policing is far too complicated for the taxpayers to understand.