Free at Last!

Rocklin Police Escaping Shared Facility

Police department says so long to its fire department "roommates" as it prepares to occupy its own 40,000-sq.-ft. station. The two departments had been sharing facilities for 20 years. LPA Sacramento Inc. was the architect and Flintco Inc. was the general contractor for the $12.3 million complex.

By Robert Carlsen

Photo by Douglas Johnson Photography.

The Sacramento office of Flintco Inc. and the city of Rocklin were putting the finishing touches in May on a $12.3 million police station.

Mark Riemer, Rocklin's project manager, said the city's police department has been sharing a facility with the fire department for the past 20 years. But with the city's population steadily rising, by 10,000 in the past five years and another 20,000 to 25,000 projected in the next 10 to 15 years, the need for a separate police facility became a city priority, Riemer added.

"The police department will be going from about 8,000 sq. ft. to 40,000 sq. ft.," Riemer said. "This is a well-conceived building, everything [is] state of the art."

With the police staff vacating its old facility, the Rocklin Fire Department gets to finally expand a bit, too, added Riemer.

Riemer said he's spent five years on the project. Construction started in October 2003. A site within the civic center boundary was chosen after years of review, he added, based on the city's general plan to group city buildings as close together as possible into what Riemer called a "civic center" campus

Flintco was the general contractor on the project and LPA Sacramento Inc. was the architect.

The facility's design reflects the craggy topography of the surrounding hills and granite quarries for which the city of Rocklin is known, according to LPA. Riemer said Rocklin was once the home of more than 80 quarries, so many building sites downtown have to be cleaned out prior to construction.

The project included building a single-level police building, a 3,600-sq.-ft. storage building and site development of four acres.

The main building is slab on grade and steel frame. The exterior is CMU, plaster, tile, stone and composite metal panels. The storage building is also slab on grade, with CMU walls and wood truss with metal roofing.

The facility features a 75-ft. indoor shooting range, 2,000-sq.-ft. fitness center, complete crime lab, community facilities, detention facility, common area, COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) division, office of the chief, dispatch/records room and an investigations department. There's also a 911 call center with four stations.

During excavation at the site's driveway area , a former quarry that was used for the past 100 years as a dump, quite a few discoveries were made.

"After wagon wheels, old bottles and other relics were found, the site was classified as an archeological and hazardous site, which reduced our staging area by half and threatened the schedule," said John Stump, Flintco project manager. "We worked closely with the city and its consultants to minimize what could have been a tremendous impact to the project."