City Council Chambers reevaluated for security

CITY HALL — Security at Glendale’s City Council Chambers continues to be evaluated for possible adjustments three weeks after Burbank put in a metal detector at its chambers and a month after a deadly council shooting in Kirkwood, Mo.

Glendale Police and city executives declined to provide specific details of possible security enhancements, citing the need to maintain the integrity of current procedures, but said recent events had prompted an appraisal of the city’s aging council chambers.

“We all got concerned and decided to look at it,” Mayor Ara Najarian said.

While city officials said there was no explicit or imminent danger to City Hall, City Clerk Ardy Kassakhian said the reality of a new landscape, changed by recent public shootings, validates at least an evaluation.

“Now is the time to have this discussion in the wake of what we’re seeing,” he said.

A challenge to city officials in determining what, if any, additional measures to put in place, is the unique layout of Glendale’s chambers, which is on the second floor of the main City Hall building on Broadway and accessed through a relatively narrow doorway.

“It’s very old and it’s very small,” Glendale Police Capt. Lief Nicolaisen said.

About the size of a large banquet room with layers of 1970s-esque faux-wood paneling and rust orange upholstery, many city officials say the chambers is due for an overhaul — a politically untenable subject amid large parkland and soccer field deficits that require millions of dollars from a constrained city capital improvement budget.

“Naturally, if they did decide to modernize the chambers, we would have several recommendations,” Nicolaisen said.

The idea for an overhaul of the chambers was broached last fall during the capital improvement budget study sessions, but was quickly drowned out by calls for increased funding for more public recreational space and other popular capital projects, like a full-scale aquatics center.

That means any additional security measures, like metal detectors, would need to be retrofitted to existing facilities.

A portable metal detector was installed at Burbank City Council Chambers Feb. 19, one week after a disorderly public speaker, who until then had a restraining order keeping him from City Hall, returned.