New Police Station Project Heating Up? Tid-bits from CAN-DO - Updated

The draft minutes from the last downtown neighborhood association meeting (CAN-DO) contain an interesting bit about movement on a new police station:

City Hall campus hopes to build a new police facility in Peace Plaza. A bond will be proposed. Seismic retrofit of City Hall is needed. New buildings in Peace Plaza will extend the life of the complex. Cost is 50 cents per 1K for bond. The plan to start a year from this coming November. Visit the police department to see how poor the facility is for our men in blue. Plans are on the drawing boards over the next year.

Back in December 2011 Council reviewed concept plans for the current preferred Civic Center site option, in a rendering by collaboration between CB|Two and ZGF architects.  (You may also recall the more general concept boards from December 2010 that the University of Oregon Students generated!)

At that time, the preferred concept Council saw was for a new police station, identified by A2, that would sit across from the Boise project. Here's a corresponding aerial view (awkwardly snipped and rotated from the google):

The building in Peace Plaza (E1) was going to be new Council Chambers.

The notes from CAN-DO may represent a change - locating the Police Station itself there in Peace Plaza - or might just loose reference all of the expansion work envisioned in the preferred concept, which does include a new building at Peace Plaza in addition to the Police Station building further north.

As folks think about this development, they would remember that the Civic Center is currently a dead zone outside of business hours, a mono-use office park that empties out at 5pm and on weekends. It would be neat to have some ground floor retail or restaurant, something unrelated to police and other City or emergency services, that would relate to the Boise project (also currently being designed by CB|Two) and create a richer zone of activity here. It's also an opportunity for a lovely building as opposed to the brutalist fortress now there.

Peace Plaza is also disconnected from the street, and is not a very well functioning public space.  Hopefully the memorial to Peace can be replaced/recreated elsewhere at a more lively location - something that would make it more known, and also make it more generally available to the public for other gatherings, both organized and impromptu.

In thinking about this, we should remember that when the earthquake hits, City Hall will be toast, so it's not like this is a frill. This is an essential infrastructure project, and hopefully the City will do it well and do it right.

Updated rendering, October 2013
(click to enlarge)

The Capitol Seismic Retrofit and the Capitol Mall

Also in the minutes is a brief note about the Capitol Mall Plan and the Capitol's seismic retrofit.  You may remember that the Legislature budgeted $35 million for this.

On Monday earlier this week, Salem City Council also held a work session with the State on this.

The retrofit will likely require closing the Capitol building for a while.  As you would imagine, this would displace lots of people, including legislators, who will need offices and meeting spaces elsewhere for a while.

There may be a cascade of significant land-use and transportation implications!

This will likely be one of those inconveniences that also offers an opportunity for some meaningful downtown transformation. 

Public details are few at the moment - but pay attention to this, as it is likely an opportunity for advocates working on several different problems to seize in coordinated fashion!

The Next Meeting

CAN-DO next meets Tuesday, September 17, 2013, at 6:00 p.m., in the First Christian Church, 685 Marion Street NE.