The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) wants $1.2 billion to turn its Austin area training center into a full-time statewide law enforcement academy — starting with a state-of-the-art active-shooter facility needing a nearly half-billion-dollar investment.
“You play like you practice,” DPS Director Steve McCraw told budget officials last month. “You need to practice in a real environment.”
If approved, the requested $466.6 million “down payment,” as McCraw called it, in the state’s 2024-2025 budget would be the start of a six-year proposal to turn the nearly 200-acre Williamson County DPS Tactical Training Center complex in Florence into a law enforcement academy for use by agencies across the state.
The $1.2 billion project figure doesn't appear in the agency’s legislative appropriations request (LAR), which comes at a time when agencies are making their bids for a share of a historic state cash surplus in the next biennium — and against the backdrop of a debate over what the state needs to do to prevent more mass killings.
A “state-of-the-art” active-shooter facility would be built with the first round of funding next year and could be used right away, McCraw told the Texas Legislative Budget Board (LBB) on Oct. 4.
DPS officials didn’t respond to requests for a copy of the proposed plans or the larger multiyear proposal, information about whether additional land purchases would be needed, or the breakdown of the cost estimate for the upgrades.
The proposed active-shooter facility was part of a presentation made by McCraw to captains at the Texas Highway Patrol, an arm of DPS, according to meeting minutes obtained by The Texas Tribune. Minutes said the facility would include the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) program — an active-shooter response training system developed 20 years ago at Texas State University in San Marcos that has been the national standard for active-shooter training for a decade.
McCraw didn’t specify whether the ALERRT program would be used, saying only that the active-shooter facility would be “state of the art” and that “currently one does not exist in Texas.”
The agency's legislative appropriations request does not give more details.
“It’s a cost we recognize as a cost that can’t be borne in any one session. It takes time to build it,” McCraw said.
This article first appeared in The Texas Tribune.
