While some residents are calling on San Jose to cut its police department, city officials have been quietly negotiating with Silicon Valley real estate billionaire John Arrillaga for the potential development of an estimated $43 million-plus police training and academy complex, planning documents obtained by this news organization reveal.
The proposed plans, submitted on behalf of Arrillaga after closed-door discussions he had with city officials, show that the facility would be situated on a vacant site Arrillaga owns on Hellyer Avenue in South San Jose, about a block from Highway 101, according to county property records. The proposal is currently under review by the city planning department but has not been endorsed by the city.
“This is not a plan that city staff has indicated a willingness to move forward on and nor has the council,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said in an interview Friday. “We need to learn more about it and all would have to be done in public session before we can spend a dime.”
The developer’s preliminary plans include a 100,000-square-foot building with a training area for current officers on one side, academy rooms for incoming officers on another side and a basketball court in the middle. Behind the main building, the complex would feature an outdoor training field, a deck and an accessory indoor shooting range.
The city has earmarked $43 million for a police training facility from Measure T — a $650 million infrastructure bond measure passed by voters in November 2018.
San Jose Public Works Director Matt Cano said his department has been in “preliminary conversations” with the property owner for several months on a potential partnership that would give San Jose the land as a donated gift.
“If we were to buy a property and build it from scratch for ourselves, our budget would not be sufficient,” he said. “In order to get what we really want, we could buy an existing building and renovate it or we could partner with someone, which is what you’re seeing with this submittal.”
The planning documents match county property records that show the site’s owners are Arrillaga and his business partner Richard Peery. The property, which the pair purchased in 2012, is assessed at $158,000 — likely a small fraction of the current market price based on the cost of recently purchased nearby parcels. Arrillaga and Peery could not be reached for comment.
Arrillaga’s preliminary plans for the new police training facility come before the city amid a local and national call to divert law enforcement funding to social and community services in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May. City leaders decided two months ago to maintain the police force’s $449 million budget but also create a new Office of Racial Equity.
The Rev. Ray Montgomery, executive director of the social justice nonprofit People Acting in Community Together, said the proposal’s timing is “detrimental to building trust with the community.”
“It’s simply irresponsible and inappropriate given the deficits this city is currently facing and the unresolved components of what people are asking for,” Montgomery said. “We’re throwing good money at a broken system and the city has once again proven they’re not interested in hearing from or listening to the people.”
Raj Jayadev of Silicon Valley De-Bug said the proposal is akin to “intentionally twisting the knife after it’s been in our back” and building a “temple of white supremacy.”
“This is not just happening in the middle of a revolutionary moment, it’s happening in the middle of a lethal pandemic and a broken economy,” Jayadev said. “People are hurting and quite literally dying, and this is just arrogance — dangerous arrogance.”
“There will be a stop to this and the city should know that. Our effort will be even more emboldened,” he added.
Upon Measure T passing in 2018, the city specified that $300 million would go toward fixing streets while the remaining $350 million would pay for improving police and fire stations and bolstering flood protections to prevent a disaster like the 2017 Coyote Creek flood from happening again.
The measure restricted San Jose to using the money for “acquisition, construction and completion of certain municipal improvements” and a spending plan passed by the council prior to the election stated that some of the funding would be used to build a new police training center. Legally, however, the city could decide to put the $43 million toward other municipal capital improvement projects without voter approval.
To that end, Liccardo said the city has been open about the desire for a facility like the one proposed by Arrillaga for nearly two years.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about this because of frustration from residents about poor 911 response times,” Liccardo said. “…And this (proposal) is something that is directly responsive to the longstanding desire of voters who overwhelmingly supported Measure T.”
A dedicated police training and academy facility such as the one proposed would be the first of its kind for San Jose.
The city currently runs its academy and training operations out of a 107,000-square-foot police substation in South San Jose at Great Oaks Boulevard and Brooklyn Avenue. The $82 million substation, which opened just a few years ago, was built with funding from another public safety bond measure approved by voters in 2002.
The initial vision for the facility was for it to become a second police headquarters where nearly 30% of the police force would work and provide critical backup for nearby emergencies. The goal was for it to reduce the time officers spent traveling to and from the police headquarters just north of downtown San Jose to their beat assignments.
But because of staffing shortfalls spurred by the late-2000s economic recession and ensuing labor strife over police pension cuts, the substation has never truly served its intended use — an issue Cano says the new training facility would remedy.
“There are two reasons for building a new facility: In addition to the city needing to open that (the substation) for its intended use, we need to get something adequate to provide training and academy needs,” Cano said.
San Jose Police Chief Eddie Gracia could not be reached for comment.
The city’s real estate department also explored constructing the facility on publicly-owned land but could not identify any available site large enough, according to Cano. Unlike most major capital projects funded by taxpayer dollars, the city has not yet put out requests for proposals to ensure a competitive bid process for the training facility.
“We’re looking very, very preliminarily at this partnership,” Cano said. “The purpose of this submittal is just for the private property owner to get an understanding of what’s feasible or not.”
Staff writers George Avalos and Leo Castañeda contributed to this story.
