A new county courthouse could be coming to San Luis Obispo.
“With the current courthouse and some of the facility and its shortcomings and inadequacies, it's really important for us to build this new courthouse to ensure that we're providing that access to the public and the community,” said Kim Bobic, Judicial Council of California Senior Project Manager
According to state officials, the San Luis Obispo Courthouse Annex is out of compliance with regulatory safety, seismic, accessibility codes, and judicial council space standards.
“It did have a seismic assessment done on the building that ranked it as a seismic risk level five, which is a high risk under FEMA, which really directed the Judicial Council to want to take it out of service from the public as a courthouse,” Bobic said.
Officials say some of the functional issues they are experiencing include inadequate space for entrance screening, undersized courtrooms with inefficient layouts, a lack of space for jurors to assemble and deliberate, and the absence of secure attorney-client interview rooms.
“The building is not intuitive,” said Dana Dowse, San Luis Obispo Superior Court Assistant Court Executive Officer. “It's not designed to be a courthouse, so we have trouble getting people to find their courtrooms or to find that department that they're supposed to be in. We also have a lot of plumbing and leak issues, so any time it rains, there's actually a downpour in several parts of our facility and that can delay courtroom operations.”
Bobic says they are looking to place the new courthouse at the corner of Monterey Street and Toro Street.
“The Project Advisory Group felt that it was super important to try and keep it in the downtown to continue to have that vitality of the courthouse use in the city's downtown,” Bobic said.
The project is currently in the environmental phase and cannot move forward until the California Environmental Quality Act is completed.
“Once we complete CEQA and the Judicial Council determines that the CEQA document can be certified, we would present that information to our Court Facility Advisory Committee, which then goes to [the] Department of Finance to get approval to proceed with the site acquisition,” Bobic explained.
Once the project is approved, officials say construction is estimated to begin in June 2028 and be completed by February 2031.
