Looking to address an immediate need, Laguna Beach plans to build a permanent emergency operations center at the Community and Recreation Center in South Laguna.

The Laguna Beach City Council was asked to choose a site to construct the secure facility on Tuesday night.

Options presented to the council included a remodel of two classrooms at the Community and Recreation Center, which was formerly the St. Catherine of Siena school site. The city paid $23 million to purchase the property from the Diocese of Orange in late 2022.

Another path called for a remodeled second floor at City Hall. A council majority appeared to favor the downtown location over South Laguna in the long term, but the timeline to complete the project weighed heavily in the decision.

In a presentation leading into the council’s discussion, City Manager Dave Kiff said the Community and Recreation Center currently supports an emergency operations center in a break room, but it takes roughly 45 minutes to set up.

An ideal emergency operations center, Kiff said, would be about 2,000 square feet, accommodate breakout rooms, include a backup power source, and have enough work space for mutual aid partners. Those partners include public safety groups like Orange County Fire Authority, the school district, and utility providers, among others. Laguna Beach would require about 44 workstations.

The existing emergency operations center is about 2,100 square feet and houses administration for the fire department.

“Everything takes a lot longer than you think it’s going to take, so 18 months with waiving the design review, to get something [at City Hall], I don’t think it’s very likely,” Councilmember Bob Whalen said. “I’m strongly in support of doing it at the CRC. It’s a potential net loss of about $450,000 more than doing it temporarily here at City Hall. I think that’s an insignificant amount to have an EOC that’s up and going.”

Whalen also noted that City Hall is not a seismically-retrofitted building while the community center is.

“I’m all in on the CRC, getting this up and going now, in three to six months,” Whalen said. “We’ve been waiting three years for it.”

Bidding for the project, conducted in October, came in higher than expected, city staff said.

“The budget included about $600,000 to set this up,” Kiff said. “Construction bids came in quite high. We even pulled out the portable generator and retooled it, and it still came in at over $1 million. So my question to the council [during the strategic planning session] was, do we want to invest this significant amount of money in the EOC at the Community and Recreation Center? Maybe we do, but it kind of depends on how long we might keep the CRC.”

Councilman Alex Rounaghi expressed frustration with the fact that the city did not yet have a fully-functional emergency operations center.

“It’s not like we didn’t prioritize this from the council level,” Rounaghi said. “We did everything we needed to do, and so now, we’re in this situation, and I’m just trying to look at this from what’s the highest, best use of our funds as we move forward. … If we could guarantee it was 18 months to get that up, I would do it. I just don’t know that we’re capable of that at this moment in time.

“I’d like for us as a city to become capable of doing things in a timely manner and have cost estimates that are accurate, so that we’re not in this situation like we are right now, where we as the council have to be put in a situation of kind of making tough choices and relooking at things that we already committed to.”

Mayor Pro Tem Hallie Jones shared those sentiments.

“I can swallow hard and support this with the same frustrations,” Jones said. “I certainly would look at how we can cut costs with the understanding that this, ideally, is a four-to-five-year facility while we’re moving forward with a more permanent solution.”