Panel Backs Site for Police Training Center

Plans to build a 43 1/2-acre training center in the northern San Fernando Valley where police officers would practice high-speed driving, shooting and other tactics moved a step closer to approval Tuesday when the site was unanimously approved by the Los Angeles Police Commission.

The site, which still must be given final approval by the City Council, is on land owned by the city Department of Water and Power on the eastern edge of the Lower Los Angeles Reservoir Basin in Granada Hills, close to the intersection of the Golden State and San Diego freeways.

Police facilities planners said the location--one of four that made the final cut for the project--is their preferred site for building a high-tech, modern training center.

“We’ve traveled all over the state and the U.S. looking at other training facilities,” said Sgt. Dave Dalton, the project’s manager, “and we combined the best of all of them to plan a state-of-the-art facility there.”

The complex, if approved, will provide classrooms, paved and unpaved roads for pursuit training, a motorcycle training area, three firing ranges, laser firearms training systems and other facilities by late 1996, Dalton said. It will have simulated streets and buildings where officers can be put through scenarios they may encounter in real life.

Planners estimated that the driver training portion of the complex will cost about $5 million, Dalton said, but no estimates have been made on the cost of building the firing ranges and tactics training areas. The complex would be paid for with funds from a $176-million police construction bond approved in an April, 1989, election, he said.

Other sites considered for the complex were a DWP parcel at San Fernando Road east of the Golden State Freeway in Sylmar, a county-owned site at the Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, and a former Glassell Park railway yard near the Los Angeles River.

The same four parcels, plus two others, are under consideration for the site of a new Police Academy that is also being planned at a cost of $40 million to $50 million.

Dalton said the North Valley complex would be the first permanent site for LAPD driver training since 1984, when the department gave up its Terminal Island location due to expansion by the Los Angeles Port Authority. Until December, 1991, police shared a facility with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at the county fairgrounds in Pomona, but they were evicted because the Fairplex had expansion plans as well, he said.

Officers currently use a 10-acre facility adjacent to Ontario Airport for driving exercises, he said.

All police officers are required by the state to complete training in the use of police vehicles before they may go out on patrol, Dalton said. The new complex would provide specialized courses where officers could practice maneuvers through narrow alleys, skid control and high-speed pursuits.

In the planned facility, officers could practice defending themselves from gunfire on arrival at a crime scene and opening fire from their patrol cars, an impossible task in the department’s current firing range and training facilities at the Police Academy, Dalton said.

A new firing range and tactics facility could be built only on the Granada Hills site, Dalton said. Due to budget considerations, only driver training facilities could be built at the other three locations.

The basin area is the only location of the four where conditions allow for open firing ranges, since air flow and sound buffers provided by nearby freeways make construction of enclosed ranges unnecessary, he said. Building open ranges would save $10 million that would be needed to construct enclosed ranges at the other sites, he said.

If the firing ranges are built, officers from the five LAPD stations in the Valley will use them for practice instead of driving to the Police Academy, Dalton said.

Jim Wickser, an assistant general manager with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the DWP will sell about five acres of the site to the Police Department and lease the rest. The land will be appraised after the decision is finalized, he said.

The City Council must now examine an environmental impact report on the site, police officials said. DWP officials currently use the basin as an equipment storage area and it has not held water since it was damaged in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. Some wildlife inhabits the area, but Wickser said the training facility would not affect it.

“There is a wetlands area that we maintain at the south-center of the basin,” Wickser said, “but the (police) facility would be located high on the side of the basin, above any wetlands area.”

Mary Edwards of the North Valley coalition--a group of about 600 homeowners--said some residents in the coalition wanted mitigations in the plan because they feared that noise from the firing range would disrupt the neighborhood.

Dalton said the nearest house to the proposed site is 3,500 feet away, and freeways and canyons would mask noise from the ranges.

Edwards said residents wanted to lessen noise from sirens as well, and wanted “mitigations for the amount of traffic that would be generated. They promised they would encourage car-pooling, but they never explained how they would do it.”

Most residents welcome an increased police presence in the neighborhood, Edwards said, but the coalition will probably express concerns about the plan to the City Council when it comes up for consideration.

“We are pro-police,” Edwards said, “but we want them to be good neighbors, too.”

Proposed Police Training Facility A 43-acre complex with classrooms, roadways for motorcycle and vehicle pursuit training and other buildings is planned for the Lower Los Angeles Reservoir Basin-West site.