Months after opening, Palo Alto police headquarters is largely empty

It’s been nearly six months since Palo Alto leaders celebrated the grand opening of the city’s new public safety building, a $123.5-million facility near California Avenue that took decades of planning and five years of construction.

Most of the work on the three-story building at 250 Sherman Ave. was completed by the summer of 2025, and city officials were looking ahead to moving the Palo Alto Police Department out of its cramped and seismically shaky headquarters in a City Hall wing and into the new facility in about six months as part of a phased transition. They would share space in the state-of-the-art facility with public safety dispatchers, administrators from the Palo Alto Fire Department and the city’s Office of Emergency Services.

But while the move was expected to be completed in January, the building remains largely unoccupied. Police officers and dispatchers remain at their old base on Forest Avenue, while the city and its contractors are trying to get the Sherman Avenue building ready for the “Phase 2” move in, which includes police officers and dispatchers.

The biggest contributor to the delays is the city’s long-simmering dispute with its main contractor Swinerton over change orders and unfinished work. As the Palo Alto Weekly has previously reported, Swinerton had filed more than 300 change orders pertaining to the public safety building requesting more than $20 million in additional funding.

As the city declined to approve the funding, Swinerton cut its workforce and left some tasks unfinished, according to the city. The company, for its part, had accused the city of mismanaging its contract and requiring its workers to go off faulty plans. The two sides had gone to mediation, which failed to resolve the dispute, according to documents that this publication had previously obtained through the California Public Records Act.

The disagreement has delayed the city’s plans for having police officers and dispatchers move into the new building, Public Works Director Brad Eggleston told Palo Alto Weekly.

“The dispute with the general contractor is ongoing; the delay in Phase 2 completion and move in is largely due to staff having to contract with third-party contractors for work the general contractor has refused to do,” Eggleston said.

To get the building over the finish line, the city has been relying on other third-party contractors. The Public Works Department is working with contractors to complete the smoke-control system in the detention area, complete the fume hood certification, complete the audio-visual work and finalize access controls for the elevators, Eggleston said.

This work is expected to be completed in the next month, subject to the execution of the supplemental contract support, he said. Meanwhile, the police department is working with vendors to fit out the dispatch area. The relocation of dispatch will follow this work, Eggleston said.

This is just the latest delay for a project that the city had initially hoped to complete by the end of 2023. City leaders have been planning for the new police headquarters for at least three decades and have commissioned numerous studies on the topic. All of them concluded that the existing facility at City Hall is too small and that it fails to comply with modern building codes and seismic standards.

When the City Council approved in 2014 a priority list of infrastructure projects that would be funded by a hotel tax increase, the public safety building was the most expensive and ambitious item on the list, which also included a bike bridge over the U.S. Highway 101, two rebuilt fire stations and a new garage, among other items.

The new building is a three-story structure with a spacious atrium, conference rooms and detention area with ADA-compliant rooms that separate juveniles from adults. It includes an emergency operations center, which would become the city’s situation room in an emergency, offices for fire department brass and space for emergency dispatchers. Public art with law enforcement themes grace the building’s exterior and lobby.

During the official grand opening last November, state Assemblymember Marc Berman said the new public safety building is about respect “for our public safety personnel working 24/7 to protect the community and for the community that will be served by this world class facility.”

Councilmember and then-Mayor Ed Lauing said at the time that the building represents the city’s commitment to the safety of its residents.

“I believe this commitment is the fundamental obligation of local government to its residents, and the public safety building is fundamentally a new way forward for enhancing public safety operations to serve the Palo Alto and Stanford communities,” Lauing said.

In addition to improving working conditions for Palo Alto’s public safety employees, the police department’s move into the California Avenue neighborhood will free up space at City Hall for other departments. In the past, councilmembers have talked about moving the permit center into the Forest Avenue wing, which could obviate the need to lease space in an office building across the street from City Hall.

Police Chief James Reifschneider said the department’s move away from City Hall will contribute to the citywide effort to make operations more efficient. By having the police department vacate its existing headquarters and allowing other departments to take it over, the city will “hopefully be able to generate savings as a result of occupying city-owned space and termination of leases,” he told the council Finance Committee on May 6.

“We are moving forward in haste with our move as best we can and working with our partners in other departments to get them ready for the move-in,” Reifschneider said.