Sandy Springs, Georgia
Police & Municipal Court Space Needs Study
Programming and facility analysis for a combined law enforcement and court facility.
Public safety research & planning
The evidence behind your next public safety decision.
We are a specialized consulting firm that takes on the questions local governments find hardest to settle alone. How many officers and firefighters do we need? What will a new facility cost? Is this contract still the right one? And how do we pay for any of it? More than 350 engagements in every region of the country stand behind our answers.
350+Local government projects completed nationwide
18+Years serving public safety agencies
36Years of experience leading every engagement
120Days to a delivered single-agency assessment
Why agencies retain us
Most staffing decisions are still made with a ratio and a hope.
Officers per thousand residents is a comparison, not an analysis. It tells a city council what other places have chosen. It cannot tell that council what its own community demands, what its own people are doing with their time, or what happens to response times if nothing changes for five years.
Our work replaces that guess with a measurement. We build staffing findings from computer-aided dispatch records, case files, payroll and timekeeping data, and the department’s own operating profile. We then show the arithmetic, line by line, so that anyone who wishes to challenge a number can see exactly where it came from.
Workload-based analysis
Response time modeling
Compensation benchmarking
Total compensation analysis
Fiscal impact modeling
Ten-year projections
Extract from a staffing projection
Authorized positions by division and planning year
| Division and position | 2021 | 2025 | 2030 | 2035 | 2040 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Administration | |||||
| Subtotal | 6 | 6 | 8 | 9 | 9 |
| Field services | |||||
| Red rotation patrol | 28 | 49 | 55 | 59 | 63 |
| Blue rotation patrol | 28 | 49 | 54 | 59 | 63 |
| Traffic | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Subtotal | 61 | 103 | 115 | 124 | 132 |
| Support services | |||||
| Subtotal | 56 | 59 | 63 | 66 | 69 |
| Communications | |||||
| Call handler | 19 | 43 | 47 | 53 | 57 |
| Subtotal | 24 | 48 | 53 | 59 | 63 |
| Total staff | 147 | 216 | 239 | 258 | 273 |
What we do
Our services, and how they connect.
Most clients come to us for one of these and discover that the questions connect. A vacancy problem turns out to be a pay problem. A staffing finding changes a space program. A space program changes a cost estimate, and the cost estimate changes the funding strategy. We are structured to follow that thread rather than hand it off.
Staffing & Deployment Studies
Workload-driven staffing analysis, response time and demand modeling, investigative workload, and multi-year staffing projection for police, fire, and communications.
Compensation & Benefits Studies
Salary benchmarking against a stated peer set, total compensation and take-home analysis, retirement system review, and retention strategy built on separation data.
Space Needs & Facility Planning
Room-by-room programming, existing facility assessment, site evaluation, and estimates of probable cost for stations, headquarters, EOCs, and justice complexes.
Feasibility & Transition Studies
Independent analysis of whether to form, consolidate, contract, or in-source a department, with full startup capital, operating cost, and implementation planning.
Owner’s Representative
Your advocate through design and construction: scope definition, RFQ and RFP preparation, selection support, and oversight from concept to occupancy.
Grants & Funding Services
A career government relations practice identifies and pursues federal, state, and local funding, including the AFG, SAFER, HMGP, and BRIC programs.
Professional education
Public Safety Facilities Planning Seminar
Alongside our consulting work we run a working session for chiefs, administrators, and elected officials on how facility projects are planned, funded, and built, well before the first dollar is committed.
Our approach
Five phases, from first data request to day-one operation.
The sequence below is the same whether the engagement is a single station study or the creation of an entire department. What changes is depth, not order.
PHASE 01
Assessment & baseline
We establish what is happening now. Document review, customized data collection instruments, structured interviews with leadership, staff, and labor representatives, and analysis of dispatch, payroll, case, and budget records. The result is a quantitative baseline rather than an impression.
PHASE 02
Strategic design & operational planning
Organizational structure, command relationships, and staffing models built from the baseline, paired with financial analysis across five-, ten-, and twenty-year horizons and an early read on the funding sources that could carry it.
PHASE 03
Infrastructure & resource preparation
Operational plans become physical requirements. Room-by-room space programming, facility options analysis, technology and equipment planning with lifecycle cost, and the policy and procedure documents the organization will run on.
PHASE 04
Implementation & risk management
A sequenced transition roadmap with explicit contingency planning for recruitment shortfalls, technology delays, and schedule float, together with the intergovernmental agreements that keep mutual aid and shared services intact throughout.
PHASE 05
Finalization, approval & hand-off
The integrated plan, the public communication strategy for any referendum or bond question, the presentation to council, and a hand-off that leaves your staff able to operate without us.
National practice
Work in every region of the country.
Police departments and sheriff’s offices. Fire and rescue services. Emergency operations centers and 911 communications centers. Municipal courts and county justice complexes. Universities. Towns of two thousand and cities of three hundred thousand.
The breadth matters because it is what makes a peer comparison worth anything. When we tell a client where they sit against comparable agencies, we are drawing on a body of work built over eighteen years rather than a literature search performed last month.
Selected engagements
A sample of recent and representative work.
Woonsocket, Rhode Island
Police, Fire & 911 Study and Owner’s Representative
Space needs analysis across three agencies, followed by owner’s representative services through project delivery.
Swatara Township, Pennsylvania
Municipal Campus Space Needs Study
Police, fire administration, emergency management, public works, and township administration assessed as one integrated campus.
Start the conversation
Tell us what your agency is facing.
Whether you are preparing a budget request, responding to a growth pressure, or standing at the beginning of a facility project, a short conversation is usually enough to tell you whether a study is the right next step, and what it would involve.