WE'RE IN THE JAILHOUSE NOW Managing the Move into Brentwood's New Police Facility
	OCTOBER 2005

by Kevin King
Photos by Russell Byrne

We moved into our new Brentwood Police Department facility in July. I never imagined that I would ever be involved in creating anything as beautiful as the new building turned out to be. It wasn’t an easy job, however. There were times when we wondered if it would ever happen!

Finding a Passion and a Profession
Twenty years ago I was a self-employed businessman with a successful automotive repair shop in Moraga and was Vice President of the local Chamber of Commerce. As a way of giving something back to the community, I thought I would take a look at joining the police reserve and unexpectedly discovered that I had real gifts for law enforcement. I ended up spending 30-40 hours a week doing volunteer work for the Moraga PD. Police work became the consuming passion in my life; my automotive business became like a hobby.

I think a big part of success in life is following your dreams, so by 1987 I had developed my staff to the point that I could let my business run on cruise control for four months while I attended the Police Academy in Pittsburg. I became a full-time Moraga police officer in November 1987. I was finally getting paid to do what I had been glad to do just for nothing; just for the love of serving in this way. I was eventually promoted to Corporal and in 1995 joined the Brentwood PD. Six years later I became a Lieutenant and am now one of the three second-in-commands reporting to Chief Mike Davies.

I have always loved being a policeman, but cops sometimes get into difficult situations, of course. Brentwood isn’t Mayberry any more, and Barney Fife wouldn’t last here 48 hours. The worse thing is assisting in medical emergencies. These are especially stressful when they involve children. Drowning or choking children; pitiful little traffic victims…. On the way to these kinds of calls you have time to be afraid of what you might find. “All you can do is all you can do,” they say. But it doesn’t help very much when you realize that “all you can do” isn’t going to be enough. It gives you a big sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach.

Compared to serious medical emergencies, bad guys are never scary, at least while they are being bad. You just deal with the situation and don’t even consider the danger until after it is over. Domestic violence, robberies in progress, “man with a gun” — those kinds of calls never shook me up. Sometimes you get a little nervous or fearful after it’s all over, and you think how different the situation could have gone. Such incidents are usually so instantaneous, however, that you don’t have time to be afraid. Half of us may not remain cops if we were forced to digest the fear factor during the time of actual confrontation.

Looking for Space
The Brentwood Police Department was located in “temporary quarters” for 28 years, prompting Chief Davies’ comment that “nothing is so permanent as that which is ‘temporary.’” The entire department was located in a few small buildings on Chestnut Street. We were sitting on top of each other, but the problem was made easier by the fact that Chief Davies, and Chief Shaw before him, always ran a cheerful organization. You can tolerate being shoulder-to-shoulder with someone you are getting along with.

Now that we’re in our new facility it is difficult to believe that we ever put up with what we had to endure. I guess we human beings tend to adapt to our environment, and we all accepted our cramped quarters as simply being “the way things are.” Anyway, our main focus, of course, was out on the street were we were serving the citizens. The crowded offices and desks played only a subsidiary part of what we do when we are really working.

Our beautiful new building is the result of a five-year history with a series of difficult sometimes-aggravating starts and restarts. The project got under way in 2000, when Larry Shaw was still Chief of Police. Because of my background in the private sector, Chief Shaw assigned me to be department representative for the new project, which was originally going to be at the corner of Walnut & Central, west of the railroad tracks behind Longs Drugs.

I was a Sergeant at the time and we took several months doing a space and needs assessment for the current staff and operations. We conducted a series of meetings with Brentwood City Council sub-committee members and with representatives from the Planning Commission in selecting an Original Architect of Record. We generated 90 percent of the construction bid-documents and were almost ready to go to bid when significant problems developed with the architectural firm, which finally led to the city separating relationships.

That forced us back to the drawing board and we again went through the process of selecting a replacement firm. Now we were faced with the additional challenges of trying to augment one architect’s work with another’s. We didn’t want to simply throw out all the hard work we had done. The firm seemed to want the end result to represent their work without being “marred” by the efforts of their competitor. We weren’t willing to pay for a total redraw of the facility so we eventually separated with the second firm, as well.

Of course, the false starts we had made meant that the anticipated time frame went missing in action, but the delay proved to be a blessing in disguise because it gave us an opportunity to examine the vacated U.S. Print site on Guthrie Lane. We did a needs-versus-benefits study of the location, looking at the increased square footage plus the financial savings to the department and to the city that it represented. When we ran all the numbers, the U.S. Print site came to the top.

Bringing it All Together
So there we were with all the plans we had finished for the Walnut site, but now we had another building that we actually had to move into. The thought of starting out from scratch was intolerable, so we put this place together like a jigsaw puzzle. We contacted a third architect firm and gave them the specific mission to use what we already had as their starting point. We had a meeting in which we literally cut the divisions out of the blueprint and pasted them into the footprint of the new building, which gave us our initial vision of how the pieces of the project might go together.

Bill Hill and Pete Petrovich, the council subcommittee, played an active roll in that part of the project. We all brainstormed together to identify the maximum best use we could make of the facility, using and redirecting the existing architect plans. Our goal was to create a facility that the city could be proud of but one that provided us with the best bang-for-buck.

Marna Huber was my co-project manager who helped immensely with the contract administration. We used RGM as our construction management firm. Ridge Greene, the onsite superintendent for RGM, was my construction expert. Ridge literally lived on the site for a few months and provided invaluable technical expertise in telling me whether my preferences were feasible and advisable. Ridge saved an enormous amount on our costs through a process of value-engineering, which involved looking at each phase of the construction and seeing if there could be an alternate way of doing the same thing cheaper.

For example, we cut in half our cost for floor-coverings by choosing a fabric that was much cheaper than the spec called for, but that still provided acceptable look and service. We saved 30 thousand dollars simply by using a medium rather than a smooth-wall finish. We saved a lot by minimizing such things as sewer runs and placing utilities near access points.

Our value-engineering activities had the additional payoff of encouraging an attitude of economy by all the players. Engineers and architects discovered that we were watching over their shoulders, which helped minimize the temptation to spend more of our money than we actually needed to for any part of the construction. Our value engineering exercises were never negative. When we took that hands-on approach, one of the clear benefits was to raise the project morale and to promote diligence in ensuring quality, while reducing the temptation to take short cuts. The workers always seemed to be glad to be working on this project.

The Right Building for Us and for our City
Our efforts have resulted in creating a state-of-the-art public building in Brentwood. Our sally port (the entrance through which people enter our booking and detention facility), for example, is designed to provide an unmistakable air of true security and detention, which minimizes the “flight-or-fight” potential of a person being brought in. It reduces the propensity of the subject to physically challenge officers in a last-ditch effort to avoid arrest or jail.

The security system in our new facility is enormously enhanced as a deterrent and evidentiary tool, over the one we had in the old building. Views through the dozens of digital cameras posted in strategic places are accessible from anywhere within the building. Since 9/11, of course, we have increased awareness of the need for making public safety facilities secure. Our system is not only state-of-the-art, but it is modular and can easily be upgraded in the future as our demand and the technology itself keeps evolving. Increasing the effectiveness of our security system means that we have decreased the amount of dedicated staff time required to keep the system up and running.

We brought the evidence property area up to current state-of-the-art technology, as well, which will maximize the effectiveness of the officers, on one hand, and minimize the questioning of evidence handling and chain-of-custody, on the other. The area is not simply secure, but it provides a systematic and flawless method of securing and processing evidence.

We have also created a state-of-the-art EOC (Emergency Operating Center). We have been able to separate the function of the EOC from the community room. In the old building the two functions had to share a single space. Our Delta Room is a separate community room available for meetings having to do with municipal business.

The EOC is designed specifically for the inevitable use as an emergency ops center permitting us to respond effectively to everything from a major disaster to a missing child. We will be able to activate numerous resources under one roof and to manage the communication of whatever departments, divisions, and agencies become involved in order to effectively address the incident.

The EOC is a multimedia communication environment, providing access to local and national news agencies, with an emergency phone system. In case of some profound disaster, the EOC will be able to sustain itself for a week. Key responders will be able to live on site for the duration of an emergency. We have a kitchen facility with food and resources capable of sustaining the staff until the emergency is over.

Another great advantage of the EOC is that it can be transformed into a training room for the department. When we were in the old facility the staff was required to travel to a remote location for any required training. Now we can do much more of this in-house, plus provide a place for other departments to come for their training.

We built six cells that we will use to hold people for less than 24 hours. We plan never to use our detention facility for more extended purposes, but, nevertheless, we built it to the standards that will permit us to do so, if the need ever arises.

We are providing facilities for REACH (Youth Intervention Outreach Program) personnel. To have REACH right on the premises with us as they work with youth diversion and other juvenile-related activities, wonderfully augments and supports the activities of our own officers as they work with troubled young people. Increasing the number of instruments in the bag of tools we have available for working with youth means everybody wins.

We also are providing an office for the local CHP unit. Permitting these officers to operate right here, rather than having to respond from Martinez to local incidents, greatly reduces their emergency response times. Having this space also permits the officers who are assigned here to remain on their beats for a greater proportion of the day.

Of the People and For the People
The Brentwood Police Department has always operated in the best law Enforcement tradition. The force’s professionalism was never accurately depicted by the non-verbals of our former, congested, “temporary” quarters. We are now working in a building that epitomizes the professional standards of the Brentwood PD. When someone who isn’t familiar with us walks into this building, the sense is accurately conveyed that we are people who know what we are doing, and are conducting ourselves according to very high professional standards. We’ve finally eliminated the incongruity between what we are and how we appear to outsiders.

I believe that the new Brentwood Police Station also epitomizes the vigorous professional demeanor that marks this city itself as it fulfills its obligations to its citizens. According to The Brentwood Way, “Good enough is never good enough.” The PD building will convey to the public the message of how great this city is.

Ultimately, this kind of project is never about managers, architects, construction companies, or even about the building itself. In the final analysis such projects are about the people. And the credit goes mainly to the people, as well. We challenged people like Peggy Schuitemaker to help ensure that Measure J passed. The measure, which passed in 2001, represented a commitment by the residents of the city that has made all the difference. Our beautiful facility is the end product of the citizens who overwhelmingly supported us.

Keith Hilton and Gary & Janet Hilton had owned the U.S. Print property. They helped greatly in making the new police station a reality. (Check on these names.) I saw Gary & Janet at Peggy’s on the Fourth of July. They were very pleased with what had taken place. Our new building was a Phoenix arising out of the ashes of their misfortune. They were glad for us; and we are grateful for the role that they played in making this happen.

The project is also about the officers and personnel working for Brentwood PD. It is a pleasant thing to watch the officers walk into the building, down the hall, and go into their locker rooms with big smiles on their faces. They’re glad for their new facility! I’m glad for them too!

It has been nice to get back to doing police work. I never envisioned spending four years of my career managing a construction project, but was glad to do this for the better good of the community. And it really is nice to get out of my car when I come to work and see this beautiful place. At that moment I’m always grateful again for being able to play a role in a project that turned out to be as great as this place is!