SAN JOSE — With two looming jail towers, police headquarters and a shuttered city hall building, Mission Street area in San Jose isn’t exactly a symbol of hope.

But starting at 5 pm Wednesday, the gloom began to lift, if ever so slightly.

Related Articles New twist on drunk tank to open in San Jose Santa Clara County’s newest stab at reducing public drunkenness — a state-of-the-art “sobering station’’ — opened its doors in a room in county’s Reentry Center for former inmates, across from a police parking lot.

Beginning with Sunnyvale, Campbell and the sheriff’s office, officers will be able to drop off severely intoxicated but otherwise mellow people to dry out — at what officials hope will be a cheaper cost to taxpayers than an emergency room or jail.

It’s part of a broader effort by local officials to try to keep substance abusers and mentally ill people out of jail after a wave of litigation over jail conditions and the 2015 murder of bipolar inmate Michael Tyree by guards.

“We’re trying to become leaders in the nation about how to keep people out of the jail in the first place,” said Supervisor Dave Cortese said at a news conference, gesturing toward the jail towers across the street. “We want to provide a safe space.”

With gleaming white walls and shiny gray floors, the new station is a far cry from a typical stark concrete jail cell. Instead of thin mattresses, the station has spiffy maroon and light blue recliners intended to reduce dizziness compared to lying flat on a bed.

Cortese and the Reentry Center’s director Javier Aguirre tested the recliners Wednesday afternoon.

“All you need is a big screen,” said Cortese, adding he would like to watch ESPN. “I wouldn’t watch a Board of Supervisors meeting — it’s like watching paint dry.”

The new station will be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year as an option for police and paramedics who pick up non-violent drunks. It will start with five recliners and initially take drop-offs by agencies that make relatively few arrests for public intoxication.

A team of nurses and “recovery coaches” will offer warm drinks, snacks and referrals to detox programs, residential treatment centers and housing services.

By next summer, the station will be available for all law enforcement agencies countywide and expand capacity for up to 20 people at a time — still a drop in the bucket compared to the more than 1,000 current inmates who are mentally ill or have substance abuse problems, or both.

Starting in January, the plan also calls for officers to be able to summon vans to pick up the pedestrians they’ve stopped for public drunkenness, sparing them from having to drop them off. The program may eventually include people arrested on suspicion of drunken driving, as in San Mateo County, but it won’t initially, officials said.

An experienced nonprofit organization, Horizon, has a $2 million contract to run the station this fiscal year, which ends June 30. The group, now headed by Mark Cloutier, has been operating a sobering center in Alameda County for eight years. It also runs detox and residential services for men here.

The center is Santa Clara County’s second try at what has become a national trend toward decriminalizing public inebriation in favor of medical treatment. A previous sobering station, housed in a trailer in back of the Main Jail complex on Hedding Street, was run first by the city of San Jose and then by the county. It closed in 2003.

The sobering station will cost about $12 million to run through 2020. The county will pay for half and the rest will be funded by a federal grant intended to reduce Medicare and Medi-Cal expenses by providing more effective care to people like homeless alcoholics who frequently use costly services like the emergency room.

Sobering stations have replaced jail drunk tanks in Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Cruz and San Francisco counties. And Contra Costa County plans to open a 24-bed facility by the end of next year.