Do Richmonders want bond for new public safety building and fire station, library updates?

Richmonders: Would you vote for a bond measure to build a new public safety building; renovate fire stations; and expand the Civic Center library branch?

District 2 Councilmember Cesar Zepeda hopes to find out this summer by commissioning a $50,000 poll of voters.

The City Council at its regular meeting Tuesday night will consider hiring a polling company to find out how residents feel about a bond measure that would raise money for revitalization projects more than a decade old, fund upgrades at several fire stations and expand the downtown library branch, where weeds are among outdated solar panels, and book shelves lack earthquake-safe wall attachments.

The amount of a potential bond measure is yet to be determined, Zepeda told Richmondside, and that question would be part of the proposed poll. Two meetings with the community would also be scheduled during the City Council’s summer recess to get further feedback on what residents want to see for the Civic Center area, he said.

The pollster would have two weeks to do the poll while the city did other preparatory work for the bond ordinance. The council would have to meet sometime before July 31 to review poll results before voting on whether to put the bond on the November ballot.

The deadline to file a ballot measure for the November election is Aug. 9, according to the Contra Costa Clerk Recorder’s website.

Zepeda says city budget woes have led to $34 million in deferred infrastructure maintenance, and the bond would be a “step in the right direction” to reinvesting in its facilities. He hopes the bond would help update critical public safety services such as the fire stations, and said expanding the downtown library branch would make room for residents to gather during natural disasters, heatwaves or prolonged power outages.

“(In prior years) nobody stopped and took a pause to look and say, ‘Okay, if we don’t invest today, tomorrow we won’t have anything,’” he said. “A lot of this should have been done many years ago so that we could just be maintaining some of these buildings instead of now potentially having to get rid of them to build new ones because they are so old.”

Public safety building would be built, returning police department to Civic Center

The city could use bond funds to build a new public safety building that would house not just the Richmond Police Department, but also possibly the Office of Neighborhood Safety, Community Crisis Intervention Team and Richmond Fire Department administrative staff, Zepeda said. 

Up until 2006, the Richmond Police Department was at the Civic Center Hall of Justice, but, due to deteriorating building conditions — including mold and leaking — the then-City Council (which had its headquarters in the Regatta Boulevard area in Marina Bay) voted 8-1 to move the department to what was intended to be a temporary location, the DiCon Fiberoptics building. There, an initial three-year lease was eventually extended to five years at a cost of $9.8 million.

The temporary relocation of city offices to Marina Bay was to allow a $104.9 million Civic Center revitalization that – if fully executed – would have been Richmond’s largest public works project to date. But, with a revenue shortfall in 2006 blamed on changes Chevron made to its calculation of the Utility User Tax (UUT), city officials shelved the plan to build a new Hall of Justice and only built what is now its present City Hall and the Richmond Auditorium.

Former Councilmember and Mayor Tom Butt, who was the only dissenting vote against relocating the police department to the DiCon building, posted in October 2006 on his email forum that the relocation would burden Richmond’s taxpayers while lining DiCon’s pockets.

“The City is paying DiCon $1.85 per square foot for the space, which is top dollar in today’s economy, but getting no contribution from DiCon for the cost of tenant improvements,” Butt wrote at the time. “This might have been reasonable for a three-year tenancy, but now DiCon is making out like a bandit, and the taxpayers are being taken to the cleaners.”

The triple-net police building lease also required the city to assume the cost of upgrading the facility. A triple net lease is a commercial lease in which the tenant pays not just rent and utilities, but also insurance, maintenance and taxes.

More recent renovations, Zepeda said, have included updating the police station’s HVAC filter system, adding charging stations for electric vehicles per state requirements, and plumbing work at the jail.

“It’s something that we can’t take with us if we leave that location,” he said of the renovations. “We are essentially just making that property owner richer. People see that and see public money being used incorrectly.”

City officials could not be reached regarding the renovations and the current cost of the five-year lease, which is set to expire at the end of the year.

“It is painful when I have to see that number,” Zepeda said, referring to the lease. “It is public money that is being thrown away, and at the end of the day we get nothing.”

“It is public money that is being thrown away, and at the end of the day we get nothing.”

Councilmember Cesar Zepeda on the city leasing a building for its police headquarters. Credit: David Buechner

A new public safety building would be a revamped version of the original Civic Center Hall of Justice plans and would cost somewhere between $80 million and $100 million based on previous estimates, but Zepeda said any new building plans would be based upon what the community wants.

“The (old) plans call for a ‘police station,’ but we aren’t going to build that,” he said, adding that he’s aware that new approaches to public safety should be reflected in a new facility. “Times change, and the needs of the community change, and we have to change along with that. The community of today is not the community from 10 years ago.”

Zepeda believes moving public safety services to the Civic Center would improve services to neighborhoods citywide. At the current location, trains entering the BNSF railyard can block officers leaving the station to respond to calls.

“The station is far away from the rest of the community,” he said. “Where Civic Center is, is more central to everyone so everyone travels the same distance to get the services there versus (the current location), where someone in the Hilltop area has to travel 15 to 20 minutes to get to the other side. It’s about equity as well.” 

Richmond police Assistant Chief Simmons said that the department would benefit from being back in the Civic Center area.

“The department can best serve the community by being centrally located in the heart of the city where we are most accessible to the public,” Simmons said in a written statement.

Simmons added that, although the train can block officers leaving the area, the 2015 construction of the Officer Bradley A. Moody Memorial Underpass on Marina Bay Parkway has helped minimize delays.

Zepeda envisions a new public safety building housing everything related to public safety, including the Office of Neighborhood Safety and the Community Crisis Response Team, even allowing for separate entrances to be considerate of public visitors who prefer not to interact with police. He maintained, however, that any final design decisions would reflect information gathered from the poll and the community.

“These would be options. We aren’t forcing,” he said. “My idea is the four-sided entrance for each office, but that is just my idea that I’m putting forth. The community may decide they want a circular building or a long building, This is ultimately going to be owned by the community.”

Upgrades for Richmond fire stations

It is no secret that Richmond’s fire stations, Zepeda said, need to be upgraded.

For example, he said, Station 67 on Cutting Boulevard — which was opened in March 1943 — and Station 68 in the Farmede-Hilltop neighborhood both have a issues with leaking during the rainy season.

“I want to make sure that when we have the next big earthquake, because it is coming, that our fire stations are working,” he said. “The last thing you need is to call the fire station on the fire station.”

Additionally, Station 66, built in the late 1930s in the North & East neighborhood, only has one restroom inside the station and a trailer with additional restrooms outside. At Station 64, which sits along Carlson Boulevard in the Panhandle-Annex neighborhood, there are security issues, and equipment has been stolen.

Station 63 alone, Zepeda said, requires $3 million in upgrades but only got $300,000 budgeted in 2023-2024, and $291,000 for 2024-25.

“How do you continue maintaining these crippled buildings for the fire stations? It is like putting lipstick on a pig,” he said. “How do we expect them to provide the city critical services when we can’t help them out a little bit? We can’t give them a building so old that it is unsafe for them as well — especially in the case of an emergency.”

According to Mike Velasquez, president of the International Association of Firefighters Local 188, which represents Richmond firefighters, the potential bond measure would help address maintenance issues that the city has deferred due to fund shortages.

“Over the past couple decades the city has deferred maintenance on our facilities due to other circumstances that were more pressing. This unfortunately puts us behind the curve and makes it more difficult to catch up,” Velasquez told Richmondside. “The proposed bond would definitely jump start the process and assist with other issues that are needed currently in the fire department such as technology upgrades, alerting equipment, a training tower, fire apparatus and support vehicles.”

Funding the library of the future

Plans to expand Richmond’s main library branch, which is 75 years old, have been in the works for more than four decades, since 1977.

Library and city officials began seeking funding in 2009, and a comprehensive Library Needs Assessment published then identifies library service needs through 2030 — now just six years away.

In September 2022, Richmond received $9.7 million in grant funding from the state to address much-needed maintenance, including HVAC work, seismic bracing of shelves, and a publicly accessible elevator.

The city was required to match that grant and did so with $3.6 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, $700,000 from library impact fees, and $500,000 from the Capital Improvement Program.

The City Council additionally approved another $15 million in funding in May 2023, bringing the total project budget to $29.5 million. The current plan is for construction to begin around May 2025.

Yet, according to Deputy Director of Community Services-Library Kate Eppler, Richmonders have said they want to see expanded services at the branch, but there isn’t enough money for everything. The wish-list includes the addition of private meeting rooms, a back-up generator to allow the library to become a resiliency center in case of a natural disaster and dedicated spaces for children and teen programming.

“These additions have been included in the current plans, but as we have gone through the process of cost estimating and making value adjustments, seeing how far we can make the money stretch, it has emerged that there are some improvements and fixes that are outside of our current budget,” she said during the City Council’s special budget meeting on June 24. 

For example, the library will need an additional $4 million in funding to address roof water leaks, an outdated solar panel system and a new trash enclosure, Eppler said.

“The library needs the money now and needs the money to finish the project they’ve been working on,” Zepeda said. “They are on a way stricter timeline.”

Richmond is the only city in Contra Costa County that operates its own libraries, Zepeda said, and it’s a vital resource for residents who don’t have access to technology.

“Let’s make ours the library everyone wants to have because we need those resources in the community,” he said.

Michelle Milam, board president of the Richmond Public Library Foundation, agreed with Zepeda’s sentiment on access but noted there is a difference between renovating the current building and a true library expansion. She said the current building lacks space to house the expanded services residents desire.

“The library is historic so there are only so many places you can expand,” she said, adding that any expansion would most likely happen in the back portion of the building. “I know there was a desire for a cafe, but they might only get a (snack) cart.”

Milam supports the idea of polling Richmonders about putting a bond measure on the ballot.

“This is something that the Library Foundation is really going to be looking at and supportive of, to let Richmonders be in the driver’s seat of really getting a pulse of where people are on a bond measure to expand library services,” Milam said. “I think our thought is why not have this discussion …(to see) what is the public appetite for it.”

The hope is that if the poll indicates voters support the bond idea, then the council will consider placing it on the November General Election ballot, Zepeda said. 

With more voters likely to turn out this fall, Zepeda said more city residents will have a chance to decide the fate of the city’s infrastructure.

“That way we get a really good sample of everyone who is out there because it is all of our Richmond,” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Station 68 had equipment stolen and now reflects that it is Station 64. The story also reflects that Station 66 does have one restroom inside as well as outside restrooms.