The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office has a new headquarters with twice as much space as its previous home.
The 346,000-square-foot office houses administrators, detectives, 911 dispatchers and many other operations on 11 of 19 floors in the rebadged Florida Blue office building at 532 Riverside Ave.
There also is a parking garage next door and a sprawling cafeteria.
The new office replaces the 52-year-old Police Memorial Building on East Bay Street. Sheriff T.K. Waters joined Mayor Donna Deegan and City Council President Nick Howland at a ribbon-cutting Tuesday.
Former Sheriffs Jim McMillan (1986-1995), Nat Glover (1995-2003) and John Rutherford (2003-2015) watched from the audience. Waters said he “basically grew up” at their former office, but the new place offers advantages, he said.
Staff monitor traffic cameras and 911 call locations in the Sheriff’s Office Real Time Crime Center. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
“The morale for the agency is tremendous since we moved to this place,” he said. “And I am super excited about the cafeteria, where we can all sit down and have lunch, and I can see all the members of the agency sitting there, having a meal together, smiling and laughing. We get a chance to fellowship and do things in this building that we never did before.”
Headquarters cost
Deegan said leasing and renovating part of the Florida Blue building — costing almost $27.5 million — was an investment in public safety.
“We have more people to protect and more ground to cover than nearly any city, so when you look at it that way, this day was inevitable,” Deegan said. “The Police Memorial Building served us well for decades, but we have simply outgrown it. … This state-of-the-art facility delivers efficient operations, updated technology and many more improvements that will benefit our entire city.”
The Police Memorial Building on East Bay Street was built 52 years ago. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
The Sheriff’s Office built the Police Memorial Building in 1974. The boxy concrete building was designed by architect William N. Morgan with rooftop landscaping and a helipad. The facility at 501 E. Bay St. had over 165,000 square feet of office space, along with 215 underground parking spaces.
As the department grew, 184 of its employees were working out of more than 73,000 square feet of office space elsewhere, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record, a Jacksonville Today news partner.
911 call dispatchers assign officers to incidents called in to operators in the call center. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
So the search began for a new site to replace a half-century-old home that was “very old” with high maintenance costs and windowless offices, the sheriff said.
“We needed a good place for our employees to work. It is very difficult to work in a place that is depressing and dark,” Waters told Jacksonville Today.
The new office has more room for crime victims and witnesses to work with detectives. And it offers investigators better access to Interstate 95, Interstate 10 and Interstate 295 and many other parts of the city — “a huge deal for us,” Waters said.
Jacksonville Sheriff T. K. Waters speaks Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, to introduce the new headquarters for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
“There’s so much good to it and no negatives,” he said. “We looked at 17 different buildings, and this one was the most practical.”
The sheriff told Jacksonville Today in July that the East Bay Street office “will be left up to the city” for reuse or demolition.
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