Solano County, New Solano Hall of Justice (Fairfield) Courthouse

The Superior Court of California, County of Solano - New Solano Hall of Justice (Fairfield) Courthouse project provides a new 12-courtroom courthouse of 141,000 square feet in the city of Fairfield. It includes secured parking for judicial officers. The project will require acquisition of a site of approximately 2.94 acres. It will replace the court’s operations and courtrooms currently in the existing Hall of Justice facility. The project will use the Design-build delivery method.

Gross Square Footage: 140,892
Total Courtrooms: 12
Current Authorized Project Budget: $265,123,000
Criteria Architect: Nelson Worldwide
Design-Build Entity: TBD
Construction Manager at Risk: TBD
Fund: Senate Bill 1407/General Fund

Solano County is served by four superior court facilities—three in the city of Fairfield and one in the city of Vallejo. These facilities are the Solano Justice Building in Vallejo (criminal, traffic, and civil matters), and in Fairfield, the Solano Hall of Justice (criminal, traffic, juvenile dependency and delinquency, civil, family law, and probate matters), Law and Justice Center (criminal matters), and Old Solano Courthouse (civil matters). The new courthouse project will replace the court’s operations and courtrooms currently in the existing county-owned Hall of Justice.

The Hall of Justice is the superior court’s largest facility and was originally a 1920s high school with an addition built in the 1970s. It is substantially out of compliance with regulatory safety, seismic, accessibility codes, and Judicial Council space standards. Among its significant functional issues are its undersized lobby and space for entrance screening for the volume of daily court users, undersized courtrooms with inefficient layouts, poor functional adjacencies, undersized/lack of space for jurors to assemble as well as deliberate, no secure attorney-client interview rooms, and no path of circulation for in-custodies separate from the public and judicial officers and staff.

For this project, the acquisition will be required of site of approximately 2.94 acres in the city of Fairfield.

The New Solano Hall of Justice (Fairfield) Courthouse will accomplish the following immediately needed improvements to the superior court and enhance its ability to serve the public:

• Provide an accessible, safe, efficient, and modern full-service courthouse in the city of Fairfield.
• Improve security, relieve overcrowding, and improve operational efficiency and customer service.
• Provide court operations in a facility with adequate space for greater functionality than in current conditions, including:

• Safe and secure internal circulation that maintains separate zones for the public, staff, and in-custodies.
• Secure, dedicated in-custody sally port to the courthouse and secure in-custody holding facilities adequate in number.
• Adequate visitor security screening and queuing in the entrance area.
• Provides secure and nonsecure attorney-client interview rooms.
• Adequately sized public waiting areas.
• Adequate space for self-help area.
• Has ADA-accessible spaces.
• Adequate spaces for jury deliberation and jury assembly with capacity for typical jury pools.
• Facility with dependable physical infrastructure.

• Remove the existing Hall of Justice from service, which is rated as a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) P-154 Very High-Risk seismically deficient building.
• Avoid substantial deferred maintenance and security system refresh expenditures.

This project is in the Immediate Need priority group and consequently is one of the highest priority trial court capital-outlay projects for the judicial branch.

This project is currently in the Acquisition phase.

The Performance Criteria phase is estimated to begin in April 2025 and complete in November 2025.

The Design-Build phase—including Construction—is estimated to begin in January 2026 and complete in December 2029.

Images pending development of project design.