Where Will City's Emergency Services Live?

Talk of a new bond measure for a public safety building to go before Palo Alto voters on a 2012 ballot emerged at an Infrastructure Blue Ribbon Committee meeting Thursday night.

A new public safety building would house a new emergency services team and the police department, Councilman Larry Klein told committee members.

The city could buy a vacant lot off Page Mill Road on Park Avenue next to the train tracks, a few blocks north of Fry’s Electronics, Klein said. The city considered purchasing this piece of property for $45-$50 million in the past. Or emergency services could go into an expanded , but Klein said this option offered limited space and would by costly.

The City Council last considered a bond campaign for public safety in 2008, before the stock market crash, Klein said. The bond idea died after consultants demonstrated only 55 percent community support, he said. Consultants had said the city needed at least a 65 percent level of support to give the bond a fighting chance, he said. The library bond, which passed that year, had 65 percent support, he said.

Alternatively, the council considered using $5 million a year from the general fund, Klein said. But this effort sank along with the economy as the city’s revenue dropped. Proposed revenue projects such as an expanded and new hotel, which would have brought in necessary money for a new emergency-service building, also fell, Klein said.

“The need for a public safety building is obviously the same as it was in 2008—perhaps, even greater,” Klein said. Bonds pay better now than they did in 2008, he said.

on Hamilton Avenue were built in 1970, Klein said, at a time when the force did not allow female police officers. “Now we have a quarter to a third who are female,” he said. “It was inadequate 41 years ago, and it is two or three times as inadequate today,” he said of the building. Not only are there are no separate restrooms for women, but there is no functional way to separate juvenile-accused defenders from the adults, he said. And police do not have the space to properly segregate evidence from contamination, he said.

A new public safety building would give police more space, and the city could set up emergency services there too. The fire department would not be housed in the new proposed building, Klein said.

Driving support for this kind of building, compared with a library, for instance, proves difficult, Klein said. “Almost everybody has positive experiences with libraries—not true with public safety buildings,” he said, to resounding laughter. “While the public safety building will have some people who are enthusiastic about it,” a ready core did not exist in comparison to the libraries back in 2008.

“Virtually every council member I’ve served with has said, if you could have one project from the fairy god mother, it would be a public safety building,” Klein said.

Some committee members suggested adding the bond measure to another building-improvement campaign. A 2002 library bond measure packaged with remodeling for the art center lost, Klein said.

Today, however, public sentiment may have changed for public safety, just as it changed for the libraries in 2008. “I think there is relative public awareness that we need to catch up on our infrastructure,” Klein said.

The infrastructure committee will take on the responsibility of making recommendations to the council on specifications of where a new emergency-services program would go, including a new building.