City Hall complex seismically safe for some city workers, not others

BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer

The city of Palo Alto is planning how to use space at City Hall that will open up once police and fire administration move to their new building by California Avenue.

One of the main reasons the city gave for constructing a new public safety building is that the existing police station, which opened in 1970, doesn’t meet the state’s standards for withstanding an earthquake.
Victor Ojakian, a former councilman who led a task force that recommended a new police building in 2008, said in an interview yesterday that the police station is still suitable for other city employees.

“There’s a difference between an office building and office workers, and what police are required to do and what they need to have available to them,” he said. “It’s a profession that has its own unique requirements.”

The police building doesn’t meet seismic standards for buildings that have essential services, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unsafe, Ojakian said.

Seismic concerns were just one shortcoming of many identified by Ojakian’s task force, he said.
For example, the hallways in the soon-to-be-abandoned police station are lined with scrapes from officers bumping the walls with their gear, he said.

The locker room for female police officers is a converted storage closet, and there isn’t a place to securely store large pieces of evidence, such as a car, he said.

Building OK for other city workers

These shortcomings affect police, but wouldn’t affect city employees such as planners, Ojakian said.
“When they move out, there’s no reason it can’t be used for a number of functions,” he said.

Ojakian’s task force explored a couple of ideas for what to do with the space: use it as an extension of City Hall, wall it off and rent it to a private party or open a police substation to serve downtown and the Stanford Shopping Center.

Council has floated the idea of using the freed up space for city employees who work in satellite offices, saving the city money on rent.

Vice Mayor Lydia Kou has also suggested converting the old police station into a homeless shelter.
The space will open up toward the end of the next year when the entire police department moves from 275 Forest Ave. and fire administrators move out of the sixth floor of City Hall.

The city could also free up space at City Hall by reconfiguring the first floor cafeteria and reducing the size of a data center on the second floor, Public Works Director Brad Eggelston said in an email.

New police station to open next year

The new police building is scheduled to open at 250 Sherman Ave. toward the end of the next year – at a cost of $117 million.

The building will have 45,000 square feet of office space, compared to 25,000 in the existing one.
The space planning at City Hall costs another $667,600, according to the project budget, which includes planning and design.

“Assuming the space planning effort determines a new use for the space, by far the largest expense in the project will be the construction/tenant improvement work that would be needed to prepare the space for the new use,” Eggelston said in an email.