Whence a $43 Million Police Training Facility?

Occasionally, articles appear in the media that prompt a public reaction based on mistaken assumptions. A title, quotation, or fact badly out of context can drive a very misleading conclusion, and clickbait can feed a contagion of myth. We saw that phenomenon recently with an article in the Mercury News concerning a potential construction of a $43 million police training facility at a site on Hellyer Avenue owned by developers John Arillaga and Dick Peery. Although the developers offered to donate the land to the City, a generally accurate article got “spun” by some commentators. A few asserted that City officials had somehow cut a back-room deal that would enrich billionaire developers and fund the “police industrial complex” despite our looming fiscal crisis. Here’s the full scoop:

• The project on Hellyer Avenue isn’t moving forward — and hasn’t for several months.

We have not spent any City staff time — other than responding to media inquiries — on Hellyer Avenue site for several months, and the project is not moving forward at this time. About $16,000 of City resources have been spent evaluating Hellyer Avenue and two other sites for a potential police training facility. As a result of that analysis — including a survey of soil records — Public Works Director Matt Cano concluded that the project would be very unlikely to land at the Hellyer Avenue site. We are evaluating other sites, however, for reasons discussed below.

• The Hellyer Avenue project isn’t being — and wasn’t — proposed by the City.

The developer submitted an application to the City to build a training facility on that site — but neither City staff nor the City Council has authorized any project there. This is essentially like any other development proposal — some are granted, and some are denied. A very public process — with public hearings — will determine the outcome, if it gets that far. What’s unique about Hellyer Avenue is that it involves an outright (and generous) donation of land by the developer to the city — and that’s what captured the interest of folks inside City Hall mindful of high land costs and tight budgets.

• The police training facility is hardly a new idea — and here’s why we’re planning to do it:

The Rev. Dave Bridgen South Substation — which we currently use for training academy cadets and for continuing the education of officers — was never built to be a training facility, but to be a police operations center from which officers would be dispatched to San Jose’s southern reaches. In those South San Jose neighborhoods, thin staffing has hampered our timely police response to emergencies, and residents have long clamored for the substation they were promised in 2002, when bond funding for that $85 million substation facility was approved by voters. The construction of the substation was completed a decade ago, but it was vacant for several years, and has never actually operated as a substation because of a severe drop in SJPD staffing levels. (In fact, SJPD is the most thinly-staffed major-city police department in the United States, and our low staffing has long undermined emergency response — we failed to meet standard 6-minute 911 response times about half the time in 2018.)

When we ran out of money during the Great Recession, we halted the lease at the prior academy site, and we even halted recruiting for a spell. After restoring the training academy, we moved its operation in 2014 to the Bridgen facility as a cost-saving measure, combining it with operations for our community service officers and other programs.

We publicly committed then that — when we had the money to hire more cops — we would restore the South Substation for its intended purpose. We did so again in 2017 when several South San Jose residents came to City Council hearings to publicly urge the City to keep its word with the voters. They were right: as we rebuild SJPD and add officers — we’ve added more than 300 new officers since 2016 — we’ll need the South Substation to support our efforts to improve emergency response. As the City Manager told the Council and the public in 2017, the substation could only be activated by moving the training facility somewhere else.

• A plan for a new training facility was publicly released in 2018, two months before voters approved a bond measure to build it

In 2018, I pushed to put the largest bond measure in San Jose’s history — Measure T — before the voters, to rebuild and repair infrastructure in our city — roads, fire stations, bridges and the like. Through two recessions prior to my tenure as Mayor, the City lacked the resources to adequately maintain our infrastructure, repave our roads, or build critically needed new facilities. So, I worked with City staff and local stakeholders to assemble a $650 million bond for such purposes.

Two months before Election Day, the City publicly released a proposed list of categories of projects to be funded by Measure T — including a new police training facility. In a September 11, 2018 public hearing, Council unanimously approved that Measure T project list, accompanying this public report in Attachment A. Concurrently, voters were told in the first line of the Measure T ballot statement that it would “upgrade 911 communications, police, fire, and paramedics facilities to improve emergency and disaster response.” The electorate overwhelmingly approved the measure, with 71 % of the vote. This was no back-room proposal.

Two years later, we’ve already used that bond measure to push ahead with several listed projects, including the construction of two fire stations, the repaving of hundreds of miles of streets, and land acquisition for a fire/ emergency operations center. It’s also been used for the purchase of more than 900 acres of open space in Coyote Valley, which will reduce risks from flooding, wildfires, and drinking water contamination — all as promised to the voters in 2018.

The police training facility was also promised to our voters in Measure T. I intend to keep that promise, and to fulfill a much older promise to our south San Jose residents for a functioning police substation.