Santa Rosa police set to move downtown substation

Santa Rosa police are planning to move their downtown substation into the Museum on the Square building under renovation.

The new space will be slightly larger than the current Old Courthouse Square location, less expensive and will provide downtown officers a long-term home from which to operate, Lt. Ray Navarro said.

“A move over to the Museum on the Square is going to allow us to have a little more stability,” Navarro said. “It was going to happen at some point.”

The city’s Downtown Enforcement Team has leased a 710-square-foot space at the southwest corner of Old Courthouse Square since 2007. The office isn’t staffed full time, but allows officers, who often patrol on bicycles, to spend more time downtown without having to return to police headquarters on Sonoma Avenue.

But last year the landlord, Zach Berkowitz of San Francisco, put the city on a month-to-month lease as he considered options for the space. Another tenant, Umpqua Bank, is leaving at the end of November, and Berkowitz said he’s looking at the possibility of a single tenant taking the entire 8,000-square-foot first floor of the building.

Museum on the Square developer Hugh Futrell said he was more than happy to accommodate the police in his building just across Third Street. The city purchased the former AT&T building for $3 million in 2007 and sought to redevelop the five-story concrete eyesore. It sold the property to Futrell in late 2013 for $1 million, and a $16 million renovation project has been underway ever since.

The two major tenants for the building announced to date include Luther Burbank Savings Bank and TLCD Architecture.

Futrell said he “wasn’t interested in driving a hard bargain” for the small police space because having officers there regularly will be mutually beneficial, he said.

“I know that my tenants will feel more secure with the police in that location,” Futrell said.

The new space will be on the south side of the building facing the transit mall, a high-traffic area where transients at times congregate. At 840-square-feet, the new space will be 18 percent larger and at $1,764 per month will be 30 percent cheaper than the rent on the current space.

The new location will also include two parking spaces for police cars, Navarro said. The current location has a single on-street parking space for a police car, so the move will free up that space for the public, Navarro said.

Details of the new space’s exterior have yet to be worked out, but the plan is to make the space just as visible to the public as the existing one, he said.

The new lease is heading to the City Council on Tuesday evening for approval.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.