More than two years since it was financially approved, the exterior of the first substation for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office appears to be mostly complete, featuring hitching posts along sidewalks and a glass facade entrance on the nearly 2-acre plot of land next to Falcon Fire Station #1.
Upon walking through the entrance of the new building is a mapped outline of El Paso County that largely blends in with the new tile floor, which, like most of the facility’s interior, has yet to be filled in.
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Sheriff Joseph Roybal said for the first time that the facility would not open until 2027 due to supply-chain issues while hosting media members for a walk-through on Wednesday.
The Sheriff’s Office had stated in multiple news releases, as recently as February, that the facility was expected to open during the “fall of 2026”, but that timeline shifted in recent weeks.
The Falcons substation tour came 13 days before Roybal’s first bid for reelection as sheriff, which sits on the November ballot alongside a measure asking county voters to reapprove the public safety sales tax that fully paid for the substation. Roybal is running against Mateo Montoya-Collins.
The substation currently has a kitchen installed, in addition to numerous shelves throughout, often beneath unfinished ceilings with lights dangling from wires.
The entrance area to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office’s new substation is seen on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026, in Falcon. (Kara Gildea, The Gazette)
The sally port, two holding cells and a multipurpose conference room were among areas that appeared to be largely complete.
Roybal cited conversations with his deputies and Colorado Springs Police Chief Adrian Vasquez as guidance in designing the substation that will eventually have new technology to improve law enforcement in unincorporated El Paso County.
The internal pieces of technology that appeared to be installed on Wednesday were permanent lighting in some spaces and security cameras, mostly still wrapped in plastic.
Nearly a month ago, Roybal told The Gazette the substation was near completion — but made no mention of the timeline changing.
“The substation is, you know, a few weeks from almost being done — probably a couple months out before it’s fully operational with staffing,” Roybal said on Sept. 24.
Roybal happened to do a walk-through of the site to evaluate how close it was to completion the morning of his phone call interview with The Gazette. A Sheriff’s Office spokesperson told The Gazette after Wednesday’s walk-through that the delivery issues had mounted in the weeks since the interview.
Before the tour, the sheriff initially said that supply chain issues did not change the substation’s opening timeline before directly attributing it to the delayed opening.
“For the most part it’s gone as planned and our partners have done a great job anticipating those lack of supplies,” Roybal said. “They’ve been very flexible and found vendors that can keep us on schedule.”
When directly asked afterward by a Gazette reporter about why the opening was delayed, Roybal said it “absolutely comes from a supply issue”.
He believed rushing to buy “less adequate materials” would not create a facility that community could be proud of and would diminish its quality.
“To me, it was important to have quality materials and craftsmanship rather than opening up two months before,” Roybal told media members outside the substation.
Once complete, members of the public should notice calls for service being responded to quicker because detention deputies can take detainees from the substation to the jail, instead of patrol deputies traveling to book inmates, Roybal said.
The 11,000-square-foot facility, which is on land gifted by the Falcon Fire Protection District, will primarily serve northern, central and eastern areas of unincorporated El Paso County, including “up to the Monument area”, Roybal said.