Police move into their new Seventh Street headquarters today,
nearly 12 years after the building was first conceived.
Gilroy – Police move into their new Seventh Street headquarters today, nearly 12 years after the building was first conceived. Officers and staff have shuttled boxes of personal files and photographs to the station all week, preparing for today’s move. By 4pm, when swing shift starts, the building should be fully operational, said Sgt. Jim Gillio.
“We don’t anticipate any disruption” in services, said Gillio. As dispatchers move the city’s emergency call center to the new building, county communications will take the city’s 911 calls; the records department, which keeps police reports and other documents, will shut down today and re-open in the new building at 7am Thursday. Gillio was unsure how long the city’s 911 calls would be routed through the county.
The only delay, Gillio said, might be if someone needed to be finger-printed: The fingerprint machine is being moved, and will be out of commission briefly while it’s transported between buildings.
“Everything’s ready to go,” Gillio said.
Everyday necessities will be moved today, with other materials – old training binders and filing cabinets, for example – following Thursday.
The move follows the grand opening of the station March 17, when its doors were opened to the public for tours and dedicated to its namesake, Gilroy’s first police chief, C. J. Laizure. Since the opening, computer systems have been installed, along with cameras for booking photos. Officers have eagerly anticipated the move, citing cramped conditions at the 41-year-old Rosanna Street building, where witnesses are sometimes interviewed in the same lobby where stray dogs are brought in and prisoners are released. The 103,000-square-foot building includes an officer workout space, multiple interview rooms, including one designed for children, and a community meeting space, available to the public.
The building has received mixed reviews from residents, some of whom applauded the city for building a headquarters that should serve the department long into the future, others of whom felt the expense was excessive and the design too clunky for its residential location. At the building’s grand opening, Laizure jokingly dubbed it “Fort Laizure” for its towering walls. Builders cut costs by pushing the headquarters above-ground, which eliminated $5 million in underground parking but gave the building its fortress-like look.
The city recently settled with building contractor SJ Amoroso for construction errors, paying $1.6 million to compensate the company for business lost due to the delays: a total of 177 days billed at $9,000 a day. The settlement, along with other overruns, has bumped the building’s total price to more than $30 million. Of more than 80 change orders submitted for the project, only 10 were requested by the city, including an upgraded energy management system, computerized card readers at the doors, and storage areas under the north stairwell. The rest resulted from design conflicts.
City Council has yet to approve the building’s final price tag, a significant increase from engineers’ original estimated cost of $17.8 million.
