Thursday, September 17, 2020

the county of San Diego is also building an emergency vehicle operations center with a track and skills course for police and emergency vehicle drivers.


 County officials in the process of building a $30 million 40 acre training track and skills course in Otay Mesa at the intersection of Otay Rd and Alta Rd for local law enforcement and other emergency personnel to train at driving their vehicles. You know, without practice they really would have no day to day experience, like, commuting to work and home. 



Currently the nearest adequate police drivers training sites are in San Bernardino and Alameda County and since vehicle training is required for all recruits, plus veteran law enforcement must periodically get re-certified, the cost of sending them that far to get certified would be more than making this long needed local training facility.

The new facility will be shared by the county sheriffs dept, SDPD, the city of San Diego, and the San Diego Community College District, which will oversee the vehicle training. The city and the college district will contribute $5 million each.

The Emergency Vehicle Operations Course will replace a joke of an interim, makeshift skills track, that the three agencies have been using for several years in the parking lot of Jack Murphy/Qualcomm Stadium in Mission Valley. Cones in the big stadium parking lots are fine for SCCA makeshift race tracks, but for realistic police training? Ludicrous. 

Prior to the stadium track, emergency vehicle operations training took place in a parking lot at Miramar College in the 1990's, until a campus expansion made that no longer feasible and the makeshift parking lot experience was move to Qualcomm Stadium parking lot.

120 years of police in San Diego county, and they never carved out a decent training center, for anything... but they sure did get a lot of golf courses.

A permanent replacement emergency vehicle drivers course site is now necessary because the city is in the process of selling the Jack Murphy/Qualcomm Stadium and surrounding acreage to San Diego State University as part of a comprehensive redevelopment plan approved by city voters last fall.

How nice for SDSU that both the stadium and the old campus are on the trolley line!


The city of San Diego’s $5 million contribution purchased the city access to the new facility for at least 60 days a year for the first 15 years it is in operation. City and county officials plan to negotiate a new deal at that time. 

The city can also store 18 patrol cars, two large trailers, a truck, a radar trailer and two “skid car” platforms that are currently neglected in Kearney Mesa, visible at the northbound 163/15 merge. In addition, the city will get two desks in an office space located within the facility’s 62,000 square-foot administration building.


2 comments:

  1. they could also rent the place out for races, autocrosses etc, and bring in good money but that would never happen.

    as for the mass transit, Atlanta was the same way, the airport was of course, the LAST place they built the train to, and the never built it to the old baseball stadium, because, the county ownd the stadium and parking lots around it, and made afortune from the parking, if the passenger train had stoppd at the stadium, that would mostly go away.

    however, they crime got so bad in the neighborhood around the old stadium that the ball team moved to the suburbs.

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    Replies
    1. Wow. The parking lot company in town has a well funded lobby situatiuon, and donate HEAVY to the mayoral candidates, all of them. That's likely why they own all the parking lots downtown.
      They make MILLIONS from those parking lots

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