By Sam Gilkey
For the News-Gazette

“Move over little dog ‘cause the big dog’s moving in.” - Hank Williams (1947).

The St. Cloud Police Department’s new special operations unit is a 26,000 pound behemoth that is hard to miss should you meet it coming down the road.

“We nicknamed it the ‘Big Dog,’” said Special Operations Sgt. Kirk Zilke, who is in charge of it and other special vehicles in the department, as well as overseeing the K-9 units and school resource officers.

“It’s a multipurpose vehicle, but it isn’t an armored vehicle,” he said. “We can use it to carry SWAT teams to a scene, as a mobile classroom at schools or as a mobile meeting hall for our neighborhood watches. It can be a cool-down area where people can go to rest during a major incident. Or we can use it for resident evacuations if we have an area that needs to be evacuated quickly.”

The vehicle is 20-feet wide, 35-feet long and 12 and a half-feet high and Zilke, who is one of three persons in the department licensed to drive the unit, said it is comparable to driving a bus.

“It has a diesel engine and drives great,” he said. “It drives straight as an arrow, has power steering and air brakes. It gets up and goes, but top speed is 63 mph.”

The new unit has its own 10,000-watt generator that runs off the diesel tank. Zilke said on a full tank of fuel the generator could run a couple of days.

The “Big Dog” was originally a 1986 Grumman fire truck in the St. Cloud Fire Rescue Department. When it was taken out of service last November, it had 75,000 miles on the odometer. Fire Rescue signed it over to the police department, which took it to the Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach, where it was turned over to an inmate training company to be remodeled.

“We told them what we wanted,” Zilke said, “and the prisoners came up with the design.”

Federal seize funds provided the $95,000 it cost to do the work. The money came from criminal cases that have been settled by the government.

PRIDE is Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises and was set up in 1981 by the state legislature as a private, not-for-profit company to teach inmates a trade they can become employed in once they are released.

There are 60 inmates in the PRIDE program at Tomoka. The irony of a man who may be serving time for vehicle theft and now working on a police unit is not lost on Zilke who said the laborers make about 55 cents an hour, “but they came up with some ideas and did a great job.”

The Tomoka Division specializes in heavy vehicle renovation for state law enforcement agencies. The facility has a complete body and paint department, graphic art studio, metal fabricators and welders and a carpentry department.

It’s not likely you will see “Big Dog” pull up to your home or business answering a call for police services.

“We try to take it out once a week to make sure it’s running OK,” he said. “But we would not normally go out on a call unless we just happened to be in the area and could be the first to respond.”