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Questions and answers
The Questions Local Governments Ask Us, Answered Plainly.
These are the questions that come up most often in first conversations with city managers, chiefs, sheriffs, and elected officials. If yours is not here, call 407-951-2117 and ask it directly.
About the Firm
What does The Center for Public Safety do?
The Center for Public Safety is a public safety management consulting firm that studies how police departments, fire and rescue services, emergency communications centers, emergency management offices, and courts are staffed, paid, and housed, and then tells the governing body what the evidence supports. The firm has completed more than 350 engagements for local governments across twenty-one states over nineteen years, and works from Winter Park, Florida, for clients nationwide.
What kinds of organizations hire you?
Our clients are cities, towns, counties, townships, special districts, and universities, and the person who calls is usually a city or county manager, a police chief, a fire chief, a sheriff, a township administrator, or an elected official who needs an independent answer to a question that has become contested. We work for the jurisdiction rather than for any one department within it, which is what allows the finding to carry weight on both sides of a budget argument.
What services do you provide?
Six service lines carry most of the work. Staffing and deployment studies determine how many people an agency needs and when they are needed. Compensation and benefits studies determine whether pay is competitive and what it would cost to fix. Space needs assessments and facility planning determine how much building an agency requires and for how long. Feasibility and transition studies answer whether to form, consolidate, contract, or bring a service back in-house. Owner's representative services protect the jurisdiction's interest through design and construction. Grant and funding services identify and pursue the money that makes a recommendation buildable. We are also retained on their own for technology needs assessments, hiring and retention planning, organizational development, site selection, and corrections staffing and compensation.
Where do you work?
We work nationwide. The firm is based in Winter Park, Florida, and has completed engagements in twenty-one states: Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Travel to the client is part of every engagement, because the work depends on seeing the operation and talking to the people running it.
Are you architects?
No, and the distinction matters. We define what a building has to do before an architect is asked to design it, establishing the operational program, the space requirement, the adjacencies, the growth horizon, and the budget envelope. The architect then designs to that requirement. Agencies that skip this step frequently discover during design development that the building being drawn is the wrong size, and by then the correction is expensive.
How long does a study take?
Schedule is driven by scope rather than by service line. A focused single-agency assessment is typically delivered within 120 days of notice to proceed, and a comprehensive multi-agency engagement runs closer to 180 days, from data collection through analysis to a final report and formal presentation. Owner's representative engagements run for the life of the construction project, from scope definition through close-out. The schedule is set out in the proposal and reported against throughout the engagement.
What does a study cost?
Fees depend on the size of the agency, the number of divisions in scope, and how much of the underlying data has to be reconstructed before analysis can begin. A published figure would be wrong for most readers, so we scope the work in conversation and set a fixed fee in the proposal. The cost of the study is known before it begins.
Will your report tell us what we want to hear?
It will tell you what the data supports, which is not always the same thing. We have concluded that departments were adequately staffed when the chief expected the opposite finding, and we have advised jurisdictions not to build. An independent study is only useful to a council if the council believes the finding would have been reported either way. Protecting that confidence is the first obligation of the work.
Can we speak to your past clients?
Yes. We provide direct contact information for client references as part of any proposal, including references on projects that went to construction and projects that concluded a jurisdiction should not build. Chiefs, sheriffs, city managers, and township administrators who have been through a full engagement give the most accurate account of what working with this firm is like.
When is the next Public Safety Facilities Planning Seminar?
The next session runs March 11 and 12, 2027 in Orlando, Florida. It is two days on how a public safety facility project is planned, funded, procured, designed, and built, written for city and county administrators, police and fire chiefs, emergency management directors, facilities department representatives, and the project management staff who carry the work day to day. It is presented jointly by The Center for Public Safety and Architects Design Group, so the planning side and the design side of a facility project are both in the room. Early registration is $395 per attendee through February 11, 2027 and $450 per attendee after that, attendance is limited to current city or county employees, and a list of area hotels is sent once a registration is confirmed. The seminar page on this site links straight to registration.
How do we start?
Call 407-951-2117 or send a note describing what your agency is facing. A short conversation is usually enough to tell you whether a study is the right next step, which service fits the question, and roughly what the work would involve. That conversation carries no fee and no expectation on either side.
Staffing and Deployment
How many police officers does a city our size need?
There is no defensible answer based on population alone. The officers-per-thousand-residents figure that circulates in council meetings compares jurisdictions that differ in call volume, geography, self-initiated activity, court obligations, and service expectations, which is why two cities of identical size can legitimately require very different staffing. The answerable question is how much work the department is actually being asked to absorb, and that is what a workload-based staffing study measures.
What is a police staffing study?
A police staffing study reconstructs the department's actual workload from its own records, including computer-aided dispatch data, case files, payroll and leave history, and court obligations, and calculates the number of sworn and civilian positions that workload requires by function, by shift, and by day of week. The result is a staffing figure the department can defend line by line, together with a projection of how that figure changes as the community grows.
How is a workload-based study different from comparing ourselves to other cities?
A peer comparison tells you what other jurisdictions decided to fund. It does not tell you what your workload requires, and it carries across whatever staffing assumptions those jurisdictions made, sound or not. We calculate the requirement independently from your own data, and the peer comparison appears at the end of the report as a sanity check on a conclusion already reached, rather than as the basis for it.
Can a staffing study conclude that we do not need more officers?
Yes, and it sometimes does. A study can also find that the total is roughly correct while the distribution is wrong, meaning the department is short on one shift and overstaffed on another, or that positions currently held by sworn officers would be better filled by civilian staff at lower cost. Those findings are frequently more valuable than a simple recommendation to hire.
Do you study fire departments and 911 centers as well?
Yes. Fire staffing analysis addresses unit hour utilization, concentration and distribution against response standards, effective response force assembly, and the staffing consequences of the shift schedule in use. Emergency communications analysis addresses call and dispatch volume by hour, position workload, call processing performance, relief factor, and the training pipeline. The method is the same in each case: measure the work, then calculate what the work requires.
What data will you need from us?
Typically computer-aided dispatch records covering four or more fiscal years, records management data on cases and clearances, payroll and leave history sufficient to calculate an accurate relief factor, the current organizational chart and shift schedules, collective bargaining agreements where they exist, and court appearance records. If the data is incomplete or the systems do not report cleanly, we reconstruct what we can and say plainly in the report what could not be verified.
What is a relief factor and why does it matter?
A relief factor is the number of people required on the roster to keep one position filled every hour it must be covered, once vacation, sick leave, training, military leave, injury leave, and holidays are accounted for. Agencies that budget positions without calculating it accurately end up structurally short and fill the gap with overtime, which is why an apparently fully staffed roster can still leave shifts uncovered.
Compensation and Benefits
How do we know whether our pay is competitive?
The reliable test is not the starting salary. It is what an employee earns across an entire career, what they take home after mandatory deductions, and what the retirement system will eventually pay them. A department can lead its market at hire and fall behind badly by year ten, which is where departments actually lose people. It shows up as experienced officers leaving for neighboring agencies while recruiting numbers look healthy.
What is a public safety compensation study?
A compensation study compares an agency's pay and benefits against a defined set of peer employers on a normalized basis, meaning the figures are adjusted so they can be compared on a like basis. It looks at base pay at every step of the career rather than only at hire, hourly rates adjusted for the different annual hours worked under different schedules, incentive and special assignment pay, employee and employer retirement contributions, health insurance cost sharing, leave accrual, and the resulting take-home position.
Why does a simple salary survey give the wrong answer?
A simple salary survey compares one number in isolation. It ignores the different annual hours worked under a 24/48 fire schedule and a 40-hour administrative week, the employee's own pension contribution, which can reverse the ranking entirely, and the value of health coverage, which for a family plan can exceed the whole difference in base pay between two agencies.
How do you choose the comparison agencies?
We build the peer set deliberately, and we tier it, rather than accepting whichever agencies happen to be nearby. The set reflects the labor market the agency actually competes in for applicants, which means agencies of comparable size and service demand, agencies within realistic commuting distance, and the specific agencies that have hired away your people. The criteria are stated in the report so the peer set can be defended in negotiations.
Will the study tell us exactly what to pay?
The study tells you where you stand, what it would cost to reach a defined market position, and what each option does to the budget over a multi-year horizon. Setting pay is a policy decision that belongs to the governing body, and it involves considerations beyond the market data. What we provide is a costed set of options that has survived scrutiny, so the decision is made on evidence rather than assertion.
Can a compensation study help with collective bargaining?
It frequently does, because it replaces competing spreadsheets with a single normalized data set both sides can examine. We do not sit at the bargaining table or take a side in negotiations. We produce the analysis, document the method fully enough that it can be checked, and stand behind the findings in public presentation.
We are losing officers to nearby agencies. Is that a pay problem?
Sometimes, and sometimes not. Compensation analysis will show whether the departures are explained by the pay position, and if they are, at which point in the career the gap opens. Where pay is competitive and people are still leaving, the cause usually lies in schedule, staffing levels, promotional opportunity, equipment, facilities, or supervision, and the study will say so rather than recommending an increase that would not fix the problem.
Space Needs and Facility Planning
How much space does a police station need?
The requirement is driven by staffing, function, and evidence and equipment storage rather than by population, and it is established by building the program from the inside out. We count the people who will work in the building at the design horizon, identify every function the building must house, size each space against operational requirements and applicable standards, and add the circulation and support space that makes those areas usable. The total is the requirement, and it is traceable back to a specific line.
What is a space needs assessment?
A space needs assessment determines how much building an agency requires, what has to be in it, how those spaces relate to one another, and how long the result will serve before it is outgrown. It establishes the operational program that an architect subsequently designs to, and it produces a defensible square footage figure and budget envelope well before design fees are committed.
Should we renovate our existing building or build new?
That question is answerable with analysis rather than instinct. We evaluate whether the existing structure can accommodate the required program, what it would cost to bring it to current standards for security, evidence handling, decontamination, resilience, and accessibility, whether the site permits expansion, and what operations would cost during a phased renovation. In some cases renovation is clearly correct. In others the renovated building still fails to meet the requirement, and that is worth knowing before the money is spent.
How far into the future should a public safety building be sized?
Staffing is projected as far out as the client needs to plan, to twenty years as a standard and further where a jurisdiction is planning to a build-out date, and the building is then sized against a twenty- to twenty-five-year service life, with the growth designed in rather than left to a future addition. Public safety facilities are financed over decades and are difficult to expand once occupied, particularly where secure circulation and evidence chain of custody are involved, so a building sized to today's staffing is obsolete on the day it opens.
Do you design the building?
No. We establish what the building must accomplish, and the architect designs it. Keeping those roles separate protects the jurisdiction, because the program is written before any design fee is at stake, and the program then becomes the standard the design is measured against through each phase. Where a project continues into design we work alongside an architecture practice experienced in public safety buildings, and on other engagements we serve as owner's representative opposite a design team the client selected independently.
What is usually missing from a public safety building that was designed without a program?
The recurring failures are evidence processing and storage sized for last year rather than for retention requirements, decontamination and gear storage placed where contaminated equipment must travel through clean space, dispatch floors that cannot be staffed at surge, insufficient secure parking and sally port capacity, training and fitness space omitted to save cost and then rented back permanently, and no capacity for the staff the agency will have at the twenty-year mark.
Can you help us make the case to voters?
Yes. Where a project requires voter approval, we provide communication strategy and presentation materials grounded in the study findings, so the case put to the public is the case the analysis supports. That work is described in full on our grants and funding page.
Feasibility and Transition
Should our city start its own police department or keep contracting with the county?
That is exactly the question a feasibility study is built to answer, and it cannot be answered from a first-year cost comparison. We build the full financial and operational picture of each option, including startup capital, annual operating cost, staffing, facility requirements, technology, implementation timeline, and risk, and then project each option far enough forward that the compounding differences become visible.
What is a feasibility study?
A feasibility study evaluates a structural change to how public safety services are delivered, such as forming an independent department, contracting an existing one out, consolidating two agencies, merging dispatch centers, or moving a service in or out of a department. Every option under consideration is costed and modeled on the same basis, so the governing body is comparing like with like rather than comparing a proposal against a memory.
Why does the twenty-year horizon matter so much?
Contract-versus-in-house questions turn on escalation rates, and two options that appear identical in year one can diverge dramatically by year twenty. A difference of two percentage points in annual escalation, compounded across two decades, dwarfs any first-year comparison. Decisions of this kind are irreversible in practice, so they deserve to be evaluated across the period they will actually govern.
Do you arrive with a preferred answer?
No. The analysis produces the finding and the governing body makes the decision. These questions are usually politically charged before the first number is produced, and a study that appears to have started from a conclusion is worth nothing to the council that has to defend the outcome.
Can a feasibility study recommend against the change?
It happens frequently. A study may find that forming an independent department is affordable but that the jurisdiction lacks the administrative capacity to sustain it, or that a proposed consolidation produces savings too small to justify the disruption. Recommending against a change is as legitimate a finding as recommending for it, and it has saved clients from expensive mistakes.
Owner’s Representative
What is an owner's representative?
An owner's representative is a professional retained by the jurisdiction to protect its interest through the design and construction of a building. In a public safety construction project every other party already has professional representation. The architect has a firm behind it, the construction manager has estimators and schedulers, and the subcontractors have their own interests. The owner is usually a city manager or a chief who already has a full-time job. That is the gap the role fills: someone whose only responsibility is the owner's interest, from the first scope conversation through occupancy.
We already have an architect and a construction manager. Why would we need one?
An architect and a construction manager are both parties to the contract, and neither is responsible for representing your side of it. An owner's representative reviews each design phase against the approved program, evaluates change orders independently, monitors schedule against the critical path, and reports to the governing body in language it can act on. The value is measured in the decisions that never became change orders.
When should an owner's representative be brought on?
Before the project goes to market, at the point where scope, site, phasing, and budget envelope are being set. That is when the decisions with the largest cost consequences are made and when they are still inexpensive to change. Coming in after design is underway is still useful, but a good deal of the available value has already been spent.
What does the role cover?
Scope and program definition, preparation of requests for qualifications and proposals, selection support including evaluation criteria and negotiation, design review at each phase against the approved program, independent budget and schedule oversight, change order evaluation, and transition through furniture, fixtures and equipment, technology cutover, commissioning, move sequencing, and close-out.
Do you take this role on projects you did not study?
Yes. More often, though, we are retained as owner's representative on projects that began with our own space needs assessment, which gives continuity from program through occupancy and means the requirement being defended in design review was written by the people defending it.
Grants and Funding
What grant programs pay for public safety facilities, staffing, and equipment?
The programs that matter most to our clients are the Assistance to Firefighters Grants for apparatus, equipment, and training, SAFER grants for hiring and for recruitment and retention, the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and related resilience funding for hardened facilities and emergency operations centers, federal law enforcement hiring and equipment programs, justice assistance funding, and the state pass-through programs that frequently matter more to a small agency than the federal headline.
Do you write the application?
Yes. We identify the programs a client is competitive for, build the application, and support the pursuit through award. Our grants practice is led by a career government relations professional with an established record in appropriations and grant processes at the state and federal level, which also opens the direct legislative appropriation route that an application portal alone does not reach.
How do we pay for a building a grant will not cover?
Most public safety facilities are funded locally, and we evaluate the available mechanisms against the project and the political environment. Those include bond referenda, certificates of obligation, impact and proportionate-share fees, special districts, and public-private arrangements. Each has different timing, different political exposure, and different limits on what it can fund.
What makes a fire grant application succeed?
Applications succeed on documented need. Fire service programs are among the most competitive and most specific in the field, and the applications that score well are the ones that demonstrate the deficiency with data rather than assert it. This is one reason grant support works well alongside a staffing or facility study, because the study has already produced the evidence the application requires.
Can you help with a bond referendum?
Yes. Where a project requires voter approval, we provide communication strategy and presentation materials grounded in the study findings, so the case put to the public is the case the analysis supports. Our executive director has led more than 225 bond and referendum campaigns since 1992, and that experience shapes how findings are presented to the public.
Start the conversation
Tell Us What Your Agency Is Facing.
Most agencies call us about a budget request, a growth pressure, or the start 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.