Alameda County Officials Celebrate Opening of New Coroner's Bureau, Crime and Health Lab

Nearly a half-century since its last upgrade, the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau will have new facilities, co-located with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Crime Lab and the Public Health Department Laboratory. County officials celebrated the opening of the refurbished building with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday morning at 2901 Peralta Oaks Court in Oakland. Alameda County Administrator Susan Muranishi said it was an opportunity to upgrade aging facilities and to redevelop the county’s properties in Jack London Square.

“It will provide a modern, fully-equipped home for county services that have struggled for many years with aging and outdated facilities,” Muranishi said. “The project also enables the county to achieve a longer-term vision of contributing to the revitalization of the downtown by brining exciting new uses to underutilized parcels in Jack London Square.”

The $31.2 million retrofit was made possible after the county’s Department of Child Support Services vacated the building in 2007 due to “seismic safety concerns,” Muranishi said. “It gave us the opportunity to look at the vacant building,” said Aki Nakao, Director of the county’s General Services Agency. “We started looking around at who needed more space, and we were able to fit those three functions within the same building. It also made sense to locate those functions together.”

The new building will allow the Coroner’s Bureau to offer families a “final viewing” of loved ones and enable families to identify them at the bureau, which they weren’t able to do to at the old building, said Deputy Sheriff Charles Frazier. Frazier said the old building, located at 480 Fourth Street in Oakland’s Jack London Square, lacked any kind of ventilation system.

“You had to open a window. That was it. Turn on a ceiling fan, which didn’t do much,” Frazier said. “This is a huge improvement.” Stainless steel doors separate the autopsy room from a viewing corridor, where investigators can look into the room and speak with pathologists via an intercom, without actually having to step inside. There’s a separate room for decomposed bodies, which tend to have a much stronger odor, and a separate entrance and processing center for bodies as they come into the pathology center, Frazier said. The new facility also comes with its own parking, which Frazier said makes him especially happy.

“We’d get parking tickets all the time if you don’t move your car in time,” Frazier said, adding he was also looking forward to not having to share a desk anymore. Deputy Health Officer Dr. Erica Pan said it makes sense for the county’s public health laboratory and law enforcement to be in the same building.

“We recently had an anthrax exercise in November and hopefully we’ll never see one, but as we plan and think about any bioterrorism event, it’s really important for law enforcement and public health to be working side-by-side,” Pan said. Muranishi said the county is planning to vacate their buildings in Jack London Square, which take up two city blocks. Currently, the Probation Department’s transitional services offices remain in part of one building, Muranishi said.

“It’s been a challenge relocating them,” she said. “First we have to get them vacant, then we’ll retain them as an asset.” Nakao said the county is looking at a public-private partnership to redevelop the two sites. Employees from the Public Health Department will move in beginning Jan. 1, followed by crime lab employees and then the Coroner’s Bureau, Nakao said.

By Bay City News

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