Police Who Don’t Car Pool Get Short End of Parking Stick at New Site

When the San Diego Police Department got ready to move late last year from its outdated and cramped headquarters on Martin Luther King Way to a gleaming new 165,000-square-foot complex a few blocks away, most rank-and-file employees could hardly wait.

Everyone looked forward to the new surroundings, the cushy carpet, the fresh-painted walls. What had many employees chafing at the bit, however, was the pleasing prospect that the department’s new complex would have something the old police station lacked completely--free parking slots for everyone.

Guess again.

Just a few short weeks after the department moved into the building at 1401 Broadway, top police brass are acknowledging--sadly--that the new structure’s two-tiered subterranean parking lot is about 200 stalls short of perfection.

“We’ve got a bit of a parking crunch here,” Assistant Chief Bob Burgreen admitted. “The chief and all the administration are very concerned about it. We’d like to provide a good parking space for every employee, but the numbers don’t add up.”

As a result, police leaders handed down a directive affecting all department employees except those assigned to squad cars. It was simple and to the point: the only workers allowed to park their cars in the department lot would be those who car pool.

The rank-and-file were none too pleased, noting that the department’s odd-hour work schedules made it next to impossible to arrange car pools and grousing that they had been promised parking spaces.

Leaders of the Police Officers Assn. and the general employees union also quickly got into the act, complaining that the order to car pool amounted to a change in working conditions that should only be addressed during a special meet-and-confer session, which has been scheduled for Monday.

In the meantime, police officials are hunting other possible solutions to the problem. One suggestion: that meters on the block encircling the police station be ripped out to create more free parking spaces. Burgreen, however, said that idea probably won’t pass muster because surrounding businesses would be affected by the overflow from the department.

Burgreen said the problem was caused because the new headquarters was planned about four years ago, and the number of department personnel has grown far beyond what was anticipated then.

“We’ve been adding officers in leaps and bounds in the last few years,” Burgreen said. “And every time you add a new officer, you’re adding his or her personal car and a police car that needs to be parked.

To make matters worse, a third deck of parking planned for the complex was yanked because of funding shortfalls for the project, he said.

Burgreen said he believes the department’s employees have been irked by the parking glitch largely because there had been such great expectations about free parking for all. At the old headquarters, most employees had to pay about $30 a month to park at a lot near the structure; the department rented a lot from the port district for its squad cars.

“For the past four years we’ve all been saying how nice it will be to go to the new station and have a place to park,” Burgreen said. “Then we got there and we were all caught by surprise. We’re not happy with it, but we’re trying to do the best we can with what we have.”