Wearing stained yellow work boots, denim jeans with a tucked-in light blue button-up shirt, Bob Prescott recently led a group of citizens room-to-room through the Santa Maria Police Department’s new headquarters at 1111 Betteravia Road. It’s directly across the street from McDonald’s; you can’t miss it.
Prescott looked more like a middle-aged construction worker than the police corporal he is, except for the badge and gun clipped to his belt.
“Don’t lose your key card or else you’re screwed,” Prescott said half jokingly as he pointed to the access system on doors to sensitive rooms in the building. “All doors are controlled by card lock, no key.”
With techy key-cards included, the total cost of the building—which is financed by general fund savings and not from special tax-raising bonds—is $29 million, according to Santa Maria Public Information Officer Mark van de Kamp. This includes the November 2008 $13.7 million purchase of the building, plus expenses for phases one and two of construction, and the anticipated third phase—which involves moving police dispatchers.
Ongoing utility and operating expenses are expected to be $180,000 annually, with the city anticipating that figure to increase yearly, van de Kamp said.
Cpl. Prescott was plucked from his job in the traffic bureau and given the duty of consultant during construction of the new SMPD building. It’s an unusual assignment but one that Prescott said is necessary. For more than a year, Prescott has been making sure the building was built to police specifications.
Everything has to abide by those specs. For instance, there are doors going in and out of the secured area where arrested suspects will be brought, booked into custody, and eventually transferred. One of those doors opens into a hallway, and it can’t be opened until the door leading to the sally port (the small courtyard surrounded by a high, razor-wire fence) is closed.
Another feature is the pane of wire mesh, bullet-resistant glass a watch commander sits behind. That person can view people who were arrested are waiting to be booked.
Holding cells have basic amenities like a toilet, sink, and a body-length bench connected to the wall—all made from stainless steel. The room is dull with light beige-colored walls. Empty holes dot the ceiling where surveillance cameras will be placed. It’s not supposed to be a happy place, Prescott said, adding that suspects aren’t meant to be in those cells for more than six hours.
“I don’t want to make it comfortable one bit,” Prescott said. “We handle our business here, and that’s it. We don’t want anyone coming back.”
The department is expected to move into the new building by June 19, according to SMPD Chief Ralph Martin. Dispatchers will follow a few months later. To say the new building will be a relief for police personnel is an understatement.
The old building, used since 1954, is practically “busting at the seams,” said Rodger Olds, senior civil engineer for Santa Maria’s public works department.
It’s a hefty upgrade, going from 28,000 to 72,000 square feet. Plenty of that “extra” space lies within the warehouse-sized evidence room buried deep within the new headquarters.
With high ceilings and rows of metal shelves, the room’s built like a fortress and somewhat representative of the building as a whole.
The building’s previous tenant was Lockheed Martin, and before construction it needed a seismic retrofit to protect against earthquakes.
Olds said essential service buildings, like a police department headquarters or a hospital, are designed with a “more stringent structural requirement” in mind, a 1.5 in architectural terms, meaning it needs reinforcement. Normally, any non-essential building is a 1, according to Olds.
The retrofit included a concrete “tilt-up,” Olds said, which means the reinforced concrete was poured and settled in molds on the ground, then those blocks were tilted up and connected to steel plates and a bunch of bolts. Sister steel columns were also added to the building’s existing ones. All the windows are made of bullet-resistant glass.
According to Olds, two tenants occupy the building. The other being Rabobank, which sits on the other side of the wall—which, is probably the perfect place for a bank.
Santa Maria-based Diani Building Company completed the retrofit, which began before interior construction work. Jim Diani, the company’s owner, is also a founding member of the Santa Maria Police Council and acts as its secretary, according to the council’s website.
For the SMPD, the added space is needed for all of the evidence the department’s required to house for various crimes, including death row cases and unsolved homicides—both of which are kept indefinitely, Prescott said.
The evidence room is like a vault. There’s no breaking into this one, or using a giant magnet to compromise evidence from the outside. In order to do that, Prescott said a criminal would have to climb onto the roof and somehow break in through there, a task that definitely would’t go unnoticed by police, Prescott said.
Only three technicians are given access to the evidence room’s separate system, which is different from the one controlling most of the building’s doors. Anyone else, even cops, requires an escort to go inside the room. A chain of custody is logged for each piece of evidence to ensure a line of accountability that would make it difficult for defense lawyers to penetrate, Prescott said.
The evidence room is only one piece of the SMPD’s new labyrinthine headquarters. Beyond the wall from where the dispatchers will work is a room that houses computer servers and definitely has the space to accommodate more.
Martin said it may be possible to house servers from other government entities, including Santa Barbara County and the Santa Maria-Bonita School District.
Among the less security-minded portions of the building is a sizeable break room for the on-duty officers, which is designed with a Johnny Rockets-type theme complete with booths, TVs, which was paid for by donated or fundraised money, Prescott said.
For Chief Martin, the new digs are great, but a few things might need to be fixed.
“It’s just like buying a house,” Martin said. “You move in and you find things wrong with it.”
Contact Staff Writer David Minsky at dminsky@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 4-11, 2015.