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Professional education
The Public Safety Facilities Planning Seminar
A working session for chiefs, administrators, elected officials, and the staff who will actually carry a facility project, covering how these projects are planned, funded, and built.
Most agencies build once in a career.
A chief may spend thirty years in the profession and be responsible for exactly one building. There is no opportunity to learn this by repetition, and the consequences of the early decisions, which are made before anyone with construction experience is involved, persist for the life of the facility.
The seminar exists to close that gap. It walks through the full arc of a public safety facility project, from recognizing that a building is failing its organization, through programming, funding, procurement, design, and construction, to occupancy. It is built around what actually goes wrong, and when.
Curriculum
What the session covers
Establishing the need
How to document that a facility is inadequate in terms a governing body will accept. Space needs assessment, the relationship between staffing projections and building size, and the difference between a deficiency and a preference.
Funding the project
The realistic funding paths for public safety construction: bonds and referenda, grant programs, certificates of obligation, impact fees, and phased approaches. What each requires, how long each takes, and which combinations actually work.
Procurement and the design team
Delivery methods and their consequences, writing an RFQ that produces comparable responses, evaluating and selecting a design team, and structuring the owner’s role so it does not collapse onto one already-busy person.
Design, construction, occupancy
Where projects go wrong: scope drift, the change order cycle, and the operational details that are value-engineered out and cannot be recovered. The session also covers the transition into a live building without interrupting service.
Who attends
Built for the whole project team, not only the chief.
Police and fire chiefs, sheriffs, and command staff. City and county managers and assistant managers. Elected officials serving on councils and commissions that will vote on these projects. Finance directors, facilities and public works directors, emergency management coordinators, and communications center managers.
The most productive attendance is a group from the same jurisdiction. A great deal of the difficulty in facility projects comes from the chief, the manager, and the finance director holding different and unexamined assumptions about what is being proposed. A shared day tends to surface that early, which is the cheapest moment to surface it.
Scheduling
Dates, location, and registration
Sessions are scheduled periodically and can also be delivered on site for a single agency, a county, or a regional association. If you would like to be notified when the next session is announced, or would like to discuss hosting one, get in touch and we will follow up with dates and details.