Future Forward

Note: Success doesn’t happen by accident. For the City of Round Rock, it’s been a decades-long process of strategic planning and methodical execution. The Future Forward series highlights our efforts to manage Round Rock’s rapid growth. 

Round Rock has well-deserved reputation for being one of the safest cities in the country, and the new Public Safety Training Center will ensure it stays that way for generations to come.

The new state-of-the-art facility features training offices and classrooms, an indoor shooting range, training village with fire training props, five-story burn tower and driving skills course.

“Quality training is critical to our community,” City Manager Laurie Hadley said. “Providing the best possible training environment for our public safety officers is essential to keep up with the demands of our growing city and will control training costs long-term.”

Voters approved funding for the project during the 2013 bond election. 

Police and Fire officials will tell you the type of training most important to our public safety personnel involve practicing low frequency, high risk incidents. Fortunately, there’s not much on the job training for active shooters and trench cave-ins. But when those scenarios play out in real life, our crews must be able to respond with confidence and efficiency to save lives.

But the key date in the project timeline would be 2005, when the City Council approved the purchase of the current Police Headquarters building that sits on 73 acres, with a future vision of using the additional property as a training facility. That foresight meant that when voters approved the funds for the state-of-the-art facility, all those resources went into the facility itself, with none needed for the land. Round Rock was thinking Future Forward more than a decade ago about its public safety needs.