SLO County beach town unveils new $51 million police and fire complex. See inside
Emergency services in Pismo Beach are set to move into their long-awaited new home after decades of work behinds the scenes at City Hall.
On Monday, the city cut the ribbon on its new Public Safety Center, a $51 million combined police and fire station on Bello Street that can trace its roots in City Council meetings back to the 1980s.
Built on the grounds of a long-unused elementary school that also served as City Hall until 1995 — and reusing that school’s edifice one last time as the facilities’ new facades — the Pismo Beach Public Safety Center represents a significant investment by the city in the future of emergency services, City Manager Jorge Garcia said.
Garcia said the construction of a comprehensive upgrade for both departments has been on the city’s backburner since the 1980s, but was more seriously revisited for consideration in 2017.
Approved by the City Council in July 2023, the new facility saw Bello Street torn up and fully rebuilt to best fit the vehicles and offices of both departments.
“Our City Council was amazing,” Pismo Beach Police Department Chief Jeff Smith said. “It was really primarily a Fire Department project starting out, and then as we looked at remodeling the Police Department and trying to meet the needs of what the police had, City Council just said, ‘You know what, let’s let’s do it right and use this site design it to fit both.’”
New facility doubles Police Department station size
The Police Department’s new home is a two-story, 20,000-square-foot complex at the intersection of Bello Street and Wadsworth Avenue, while the Fire Department’s new 14,000-square-foot station is located to the south on Bello Street.
That new home for the Police Department is around twice as large as its old headquarters, and is a welcome sight to officers after four years of operating out of a temporary headquarters in downtown Pismo Beach, Smith said.
The dispatch station was expanded for multiple dispatchers, while more office space and meeting and interview rooms will give officers more room to do their work, he said. The new police station also includes “soft interview” rooms for children and victims of trauma, harder interview rooms in lieu of jail cells and specialized K9 and armory rooms.
Most of all, the new facility features dedicated parking for patrol cars and an abundance of storage space for specialized vehicles and equipment that the old headquarters simply lacked, Smith said.
The price included all the furniture, machines, computers and new networks, so there’s not a lot we have to move over,” Smith said. “The most complicated part of the move is getting all our property and evidence over, because we have to track all that.”
On the Fire Department side, response times are expected to be shortened by two to three minutes simply because the new facility houses both personnel and vehicles under the same roof — a feature the old Fire Department lacked, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Travis Craig said.
The Fire Department’s new digs feature extra bunks for future crew expansions, decontamination showers and cleaning equipment, a full kitchen and relaxation area, gym and, most importantly, a massive new garage with front and rear entrances for storing on- and off-duty vehicles.
Craig said sharing the space with the Police Department makes sense because emergency response calls are likely to involve units from both agencies, and the unified space will make coordination between the agencies easier.
“Public safety facilities are really the new way for emergency response,” Craig said. “When you have your police and your fire together, they can work and train together, and they can respond together from the same part of the city.”
Emergency services to move in this month
Both emergency service providers are in the middle of moving into their new homes on Bello Street, and are expected to finalize their moves over the next two weeks, Garcia said.
Though the price tag for the new facility was estimated at around $53 million, the final spend came in around $2 million under that figure, Garcia said.
The city was able to reuse land it already owned, and even reused individual bricks from the original school facade, keeping prices lower for the project, Garcia said.
“The brick was originally produced in the ‘20s and ‘30s in San Luis Obispo,” Garcia said. “One of the employees that cleaned every single one of these bricks so that we can put them back on was a descendant of someone who worked at the (original) brick garden.”
Most importantly, two-thirds of the project is funded by a 1% transient occupancy tax approved by the voters in 2020, while the rest is being paid for by parking meter residents, ensuring that “visitors and tourists could pay their fair share of their impact to our public safety needs,” Garcia said.
A public-facing ribbon cutting was held Monday afternoon at 4 p.m., with appearances from city government and public safety officials.
This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 9:52 AM.
