Ground Broken for Simi Police Headquarters

They broke ground Thursday for the long-awaited, $12-million police headquarters, marking the moment with hope, scorn and gold-painted shovels.

The shovels came from city supplies, wielded by the Simi Valley City Council, legislators and police chiefs past and present who turned ceremonial loads of dirt.

Hope swelled in the voices of officials who said they never thought they’d see the work begin--as it will today when backhoes are expected to dig beside City Hall to make way for the station’s 100-car underground garage.

And the officials saved their scorn for the current Cochran Street police station--a leaky, quake-battered, 27-year-old “temporary” building that the department outgrew more than a decade ago.

Police Chief Randy Adams thanked the council for agreeing to fund the building, his staff for planning it and his officers for putting up with the battered, old station for so long--then shouted an exultant, fist-pumping “Yes!”

And Councilman Paul Miller, the city’s former chief, remembered how it used to be:

“When I first got here in 1981, the chief’s office was about the size of a large broom closet, and you couldn’t really walk around the place without bumping into someone,” Miller told a crowd of nearly 200 officials, police employees and bystanders.

Miller said he began pressuring the council to build a new station in 1984. By then, other city departments had moved out of the building and into the new City Hall, leaving the police to fill every vacant room.

Then in 1994, the Northridge earthquake nearly shook the station to pieces, forcing the council’s hand.

“The ‘guy upstairs’ must have heard [me] because 10 years later, he trashed the building for us,” Miller joked. “And we thank him for it.”

Another piece fell into place, too: The city became big enough to need--and be able to pay for--a building large enough for the 116-officer force.

“We’ve attracted the development and the tax base to this community that have allowed us to be able to afford it,” said Mayor Greg Stratton. The city will pay for the new station with a mix of bonds, earthquake relief aid and contingency funds.

The old and new police headquarters are a study in contrasts, said Lt. Neal Rein, who has overseen planning the department’s new work space.

The new building will be more than twice as large: Officers now squeezed into barely 25 square feet each will have 60 square feet apiece when the building opens in early 1998.

The old building leaks and lacks enough space for records and evidence storage. Stolen property is stacked in closets and in cargo containers in the back parking lot.

And offices for the narcotics squad, special-enforcement section, records department and the entire Emergency Operations Center sit across the parking lot in another building that once served as Simi Valley’s courthouse.

“The best example I personally can give is when I need to look at plans for the new building, I have to lay them on the floor in the middle of the hallway, and people have to step on them or around them,” Rein said in an interview. “My office space just isn’t large enough.

“When I look for a conference room or interview room that isn’t occupied,” he said, “I’ll wander around like a lost little lamb looking for a place to sit and talk to somebody.”

Now, patrol officers must stand in the 15-by-20-foot briefing room before each shift because there is not enough room to set up chairs for all of them, said Capt. Jerome Boyce.

Work will flow more logically through the new building, Rein said.

“When a patrol officer gets to work, he’ll be able to go from the parking lot to the locker room, to the briefing room, to the armory to pick up his equipment, downstairs where he’ll have another storage locker for the patrol car equipment, to the patrol car and then out,” Rein said. “Whereas now, they have to jump from here to there. It’s incredibly time-consuming.”

There will be separate holding cells for juvenile suspects, at least four additional interview rooms where now there are two, and a more comfortable environment for taking complaints from the public.

Interview rooms will lead off the main lobby, and officers may no longer find themselves taking crime complaints while standing out on the front sidewalk, Rein said.

He added, “It’s very inconvenient now. It’s the opposite of user-friendly.”