At a meeting on Tuesday, the San Luis Obispo Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to award a nearly $23.5 million contract to Santa Maria-based company Diani Building Corporation to design and build the center.
Construction will begin in the spring of 2023 and should be completed by November 2024, according to Steve Neer, San Luis Obispo County's associate capital projects coordinator.
Cal Fire and the Sheriff's Office often work together to respond to emergencies, so the shared facility will improve that collaboration, Sheriff Ian Parkinson said during Tuesday's meeting.
"The goal was to have a facility that we can operate out of effectively," Parkinson said. "There's a public benefit to speeding up the communication between public safety entities in the same room."
The station will operate as the "primary public safety answering point," county documents said. That means 911 calls made from unincorporated areas of the county will be answered by the station.
When people call 911, the call is directed to different dispatch centers based on the caller's location. The cities of Atascadero, Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo have their own dispatch centers that send emergency services to the caller.
Alternatively, 911 calls from Arroyo Grande, Morro Bay and unincorporated areas are directed to the Sheriff's Office's main station on Kansas Avenue just north of San Luis Obispo.
Right now, the Sheriff's Office directs fire and medical calls to Cal Fire's office on north Santa Rosa Street in San Luis Obispo, creating a delay in services, Parkinson said.
"You don't have the ability to have face-to-face communication, particularly in some of the major disasters that we do have at times such as fires, which happen all the time, where we have to combine services in so many ways," Parkinson said.
Housing Cal Fire and the Sheriff's Office in the same building will improve communication and collaboration between the agencies, Parkinson said.
Cal Fire Deputy Chief John Owens agreed.
"It will increase our effectiveness and efficiency and public safety," Owens said at Tuesday's meeting. "For all types of emergencies — not just fires, but all-risk emergencies throughout the county."
The main Sheriff's Office station was built 40 years ago and is too small to accommodate all of the agency's operations, Parkinson said.
The Sheriff's Office shares the building with PG&E and the county's Emergency Operations Center, so the agency is not able to expand its office.
"It's grossly undersized for how much we have grown since the early '80s," Parkinson said.
WHAT WILL NEW DISPATCH CENTER LOOK LIKE?
The new dispatch center, which will be located on north Main Street in Templeton, will include a 18,000-square-foot dispatch building, a 140-foot tall communication tower, 64 parking spots and landscaping, county documents said.
It will be able to accommodate 15 to 30 staff members.
The new dispatch center will be built on a lot alongside an existing Sheriff's Office substation and a San Luis Obispo County Department of Agriculture building. That site is close to the freeway, which allows Cal Fire and law enforcement to get to emergencies quickly, Neer said at the meeting.
According to Neer, the center will include a variety of facilities, such as a fire mobile command unit, sheriff bomb truck shelters, a secure armory.
There will also be radio communications space, an information technology server and amenities for staff, such as offices, a kitchen, an exercise space, dormitories and laundry.
The communications tower will send radio waves to and from other dispatch centers so they can communicate about emergencies in the area. The tower will have 45 attached antennas, which increase its combined height to 160 feet.
The tower will cause "significant visual impacts in the area," disrupting scenic views, the environmental impact report said.
Community members who spoke during the public comment portion of Tuesday's meeting shared their concerns about the aesthetic impacts of the tower.
However, Neer said the tower is necessary to the operations of the dispatch center.
Since the center has to send signals to dispatch centers in high places such as Cuesta Peak and Tassajara Peak, he said, communications tower must be tall to avoid signal interference.
It must have a "direct signal path" to at least one other agency — allowing the signal to bounce directly from one communications tower to the other, Neer told The Tribune in an interview on Friday.
"We do need height for the equipment on the tower to beam direct signals," Neer told The Tribune. "It's really point-to-point communication."
Building a tall tower ensures the radio waves won't run into obstructions such as homes.
"At the 60- or 80-foot level, the terrain would obstruct that line of sight to the Cuesta Peak, Tassajara Peak mountain facilities," county IT manager Paul Porter said at Tuesday's meeting. "We had to raise the tower height so those antenna and dishes would clear the obstructions and have that unimpeded signal path to the mountaintop sites."
Additionally, the tower combines a 60 foot communications tower from the sheriff's dispatch facility and an 80 foot tower from Cal Fire's dispatch facility — so the new tower must be tall enough to accommodate all of that equipment, Porter said.
"You still need that combined 140 feet worth of real estate space on the tower to mount everything," he said.
HOW MUCH DOES THE PROJECT COST?
San Luis Obispo County has spent about $1,973,000 million on the dispatch center project since 2013, Neer told The Tribune, and budgeted for another estimated $36,681,523.
The project's outstanding costs are as follows:
- $23,482,458 for design and construction;
- $1.5 million for unanticipated expenses;
- $5,670,102 for building and site costs including antennas for communications tower, software and dispatch systems furniture; and
- $6,028,963 for soft costs including permit and inspection fees.
Much of the project is already funded by numerous sources, including the county's General Fund, Proposition 172 monies and public facility fees for law enforcement and fire services.
The county's auditor-controller still must sell about $25 million in bonds to cover the rest of the project, but the county is able to begin the design and building process without those funds, Neer told The Tribune.
This story was originally published August 28, 2022 10:00 AM.
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