Vacant since the Sheriff’s Department moved to a new North Auburn headquarters last year, a 65-year-old former Army hospital building from World War II is being demolished to make way for more Placer County parking.

A total of 120 new spaces will be created by the removal of the former sheriff’s headquarters and four other nearby buildings.

The county’s $2.5 million project includes $600,000 for demolition and project management, with work to tear down the structures starting this past Friday.

County architect Joel Swift told supervisors Tuesday that the addition of the 120 parking spaces would be the final component in construction of the Community Development Resource Center. The center was completed last year, allowing several development and resources-related county offices to be housed under one roof at the North Auburn government center.

The center’s location originally housed an Army hospital during the waning days of World War II. After the war, the property was transferred to the state and used as a mental institution. The county took over the site in the early 1970s and put a plan in place four years ago to replace most of the original structures with new buildings.

In other board business:

- Supervisors OK’d plans for expanding alternative sentencing programs to allow law enforcement and the court system to put in place mandatory home detention and electronic monitoring as sentencing options. Capt. George Malim, commander of the Placer County Jail, said that inmates are currently opting to bypass what are now optional home detention or electronic monitoring sentences because they know that jail overcrowding will likely mean they won’t have to complete their time. A federal court order requires the county to keep jail population at about 90 percent of capacity and inmates are being released early to keep under the cap. Time served by inmates who are released early has been averaging 13 days less than what they were sentenced for. The North Auburn jail’s capacity is 686 inmates.

- County public information officers Mike Fitch and Robert Miller, along with Emergency Services Office Program Manager Rui Cunha, were singled out in a letter read by Supervisor Jim Holmes and written by the office of the director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services for their work during a series of lightning-caused fires throughout the state this summer. They worked with other counties to coordinate public information efforts, Holmes said, quoting from the letter.

The Journal’s Gus Thomson can be reached at gust@goldcountrymedia.com.