This facility received the LE Facilities II Gold award in the 2022 Officer Station Design Awards.
In 2015, South San Francisco citizens approved Measure W, a district tax plan to fund the replacement of outdated City facilities. The City hired a design team in 2018 to work with the Police Department to implement this vision and establish current and future needs. Due to skyrocketing Bay-Area construction costs, the resulting program maintained a tight building footprint.
The California Essential Services Act (ESA) added additional cost concerns due to the liquefiable soil conditions on the building site, which led to a compact facility. Despite the tight facility parcel, the team elected to build a support building for non-essential functions. This stand-alone building didn’t have to meet the ESA and offered a cost savings opportunity. The support building houses several storage functions and, most importantly, a 5-lane, 25-yard tactical firing range.
The first floor includes Patrol, Detention, Records, and Evidence departments and provides secure access to the public’s most-needed areas. The public Community Room doubles as a police training area with a secure back entry for police. A public elevator provides a second-floor lobby waiting room for the administration area and investigations interview suite. The second floor has the locker and exercise rooms and the main break room with a balcony shared by Dispatch.
All staff areas on the public side, except administration, are limited to high glass which floods the building with natural light, borrowed for offices and work areas. The design encourages staff interaction using the primary stair to circulate staff between work and break areas. Exposed and highlighted ESA seismic bracing demonstrates facility safety is always top of mind. Located at a major intersection, we used a row of k-rated bollards to protect the facility from vehicular assault.
The South San Francisco Police Department had never occupied a facility designed specifically for police needs and services. Their last facility was a section, with one window, of an old department store retrofitted with office space, detention areas, and an indoor firing range—that current standards would never allow.
As we began to design, these shortcomings were top of mind for the Police. Another design driver was that Measure W funding ensured updated dispatch capabilities to replace the previously cramped dispatch area with poor environmental controls and no natural light. We would also ensure that the new facility complied with the Essential Services Act (ESA).
Maximizing natural light was a project design feature. The new facility offers direct natural light or borrowed natural light for most offices and work areas, except for two small auxiliary offices outside the administrative suite. The firing range has superior lighting and laminar air flow to keep toxins away from shooters, something the previous range lacked. The dispatch area is larger and provides all the amenities required to comply with APCO recommendations and large windows with automated shades. We decided to expose and highlight the required ESA seismic bracing in several areas. This feature demonstrates to the public and staff that we designed the facility safety in all regards.
The police were concerned that a multi-story facility could minimize contact between departments. To address this, we created the primary staff vertical circulation adjacent to the patrol report writing area on the lower level and the main break room on the upper, allowing the stair to provide a visual link between these two spaces.
Architect/Firm Name: Brinkley Sargent Wiginton/SmithGroup