The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services in a few years will have a new operations center in Costa Mesa.
The state’s Department of General Services awarded a $158 million contract to Turner Construction Company to build the facility using state-owned property in town, according to a December news release.
The Southern Region Emergency Operations Center will be located on the southwestern corner of the Fairview Developmental Center. The facility will support local coordination during disasters, but day-to-day will be an office for Cal OES employees and to conduct simulations to prepare for emergencies.
The emergency operations center will be built on about 15 acres of the Fairview Developmental Center, located off of Merrimac Way.
It will include a 35,000-square-foot, single-story office building, a 20,000-square-foot warehouse with a vehicle maintenance bay, and a more than 100-foot-tall communication tower with antennas.
The building will have solar panels, battery energy storage and emergency generators. Originally, Cal OES wanted to build a helipad at the site, but the state removed funding for those plans.
Originally 752 acres and opened in 1959 as Fairview State Hospital, the state-run facility served people with developmental disabilities and has been slowly closed over the last few years.
The Fairview Developmental Center is now 114 acres with most of the land transferred to the city back in 1979.
The new Southern Region Emergency Operations Center will replace a temporary facility being used in Los Alamitos and will be a backup for a larger emergency operations center in Sacramento County.
Cal OES is the state agency that coordinates disaster response. The new facility will serve the Cal OES’s Southern region, which has 11 counties, including Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego.
A Cal OES description of the project calls the region a major economic driver “with a population density centered on some of the state’s highest risk earthquake faults.”
Construction will be finished by mid-2027, according to a news release from Turner Construction.
There are also plans by the city to earmark the remaining property for the development of housing. Plans are looking at anywhere from 2,300 to 4,000 housing units. The homes would be made affordable across a range of income levels, officials have said.
A number of workshops were held for the community over the summer on the concepts for how the land would be used. You can find more about the city’s vision for the property and get updates on the planning at fdcplan.com.
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