City formulates plans for future Auburn Justice Center

Published 5:30 am Friday, April 3, 2026

On the upside, the Auburn Justice Center building is in fair, physical condition.

On the downside, however, the 83-year-old building — which began life in 1943 as Dahlgren-Massey Fine Foods and now houses the Auburn Police Department and the city’s court — does not meet the long-term needs of a modern police department of its size.

“It’s simply out of space by today’s standards,” said Bernie O’Donnell, CEO of Renton-Based Rock Project Management, during an Auburn City Council study session on March 23.

If the APD is to get its new, much larger headquarters, the city will need to find the money to make it happen.

Closer details including building costs and maintenance, not to mention the precise location.

O’Donnell and Adam Wilson, also of Rock Project Management, came to the meeting to provide city leadership an update on the work their company has been doing on Auburn’s behalf since the city brought it on as a consultant in October 2025.

As O’Donnell, told the council, in the six months since then, Rock Project Management has focused on validating the assumptions made in a 2021 city-wide plan to deal with the Auburn Justice Center and other aging facilities — including the city’s maintenance and operations complex on C Street Southwest and City Hall.

In addition to City Hall and the annex to the east, and the city’s maintenance and operations shops, the overall plan named the Auburn Justice Center, home of the Auburn Police Department and court, to determine if there were problems with any of them, and if there were, what the city would need to do to update them. At the same time, the study determined that once the city had identified a future site for a possible new police headquarters, it would have to determine precisely what improvements would best serve the city in the future.

Among the plan’s original findings was that renovating the Auburn Justice Center could not be a 50-year solution as the building was not big enough to house what the city needed. That’s when the city started to look for a potential home in either downtown or near Les Gove Park.

As the study determined that the downtown property was not large enough, in 2023, the city bought land at the northwest corner of 12th Street Southeast and Auburn Way South (the Les Gove Park option) for its public safety needs. Since 2025 and into 2026, the city has been developing the Police Headquarters Master Plan for that property.

The study’s final recommendations were that the city::

• Invest $7 million in a new evidence storage building on the property, but renovate the present building even as it invests $48 million for a future HQ project, to be timed as funding allows.

• Include $250,000 in spending for facility maintenance needs.

The above numbers are only educated assumptions and should in no way be considered final, according to the consultants.

In 2025, council adopted the additional 0.1% sales tax for public safety, to take effect in April 2026.

The consultant has also been conducting a space-needs assessment and test fitting city-owned property in the residential area near Les Gove Park to determine what could fit within it. This work as of March 23 has consisted mainly of test-fitting various geometric shapes within the boundaries.

Determining what those structures would actually be is a discussion for a later day once the city has engaged a design team.

But after assessing the physical condition and space needs by police divisions, and determining each division’s individual needs, staff input and the standards of the International Association of Police Chiefs developed the space sizes and functional requirements for each division.

The conclusion was that a new building would need about roughly 46,000 square feet of space, in part to bring it to current health and wellness standards, for instance by incorporating a gymnasium and more training space, whereas the present facility is just shy of 28,000 square feet.

The consultant assessed police facilities serving the existing cities of Redmond, Tukwila and Tacoma’s against the Auburn police department for their use of space.

As far as space needs related to parking, today the justice center has a total of 65 parking stalls, where about 129 parking stalls would be needed, according to O’Donnell.

The city plans a vigorous public engagement process.