ties and its options moving forward goes well beyond locating and count- ing up the department’s itinerant em- ployees. Such studies produce a huge amount of data—so much data that a department could go for years looking at all the what-ifs.
But, departments typically find that the process offers invaluable insights into how the department functions now, while providing a roadmap to future operational efficiency, regard- less of what type of capital project it ultimately undertakes.
Something Old, Something New Although many cities fi rst engage the services of a planning specialist spe- cifi cally because they want to know whether renovation of their existing building is feasible, this is actually among the more straightforward issues planners must contend with. Deciding between new construction and renova- tion is strictly a matter of ‘asset value.’ For a renovation to be financially worthwhile, the amount of money spent in demolition must be lower than the value of the asset that remains prior to rebuild. If you were to spend $3 million stripping away interiors to save a building shell and site worth only $2.5 million, you’d have just thrown away $500,000.
The equation in Keller, Texas, where we were brought in to study the reno- vation/new construction question, re- ally was that simple. This suburban community had a large jail, represent- ing about a third of the existing build- ing, with which the department was very happy.
Given this asset’s tremendous value, it would never have made sense to build an entirely brand-new facil- ity. With that settled, the next ques- tion was whether the project could be phased in such a way that temporary quarters would not have to be pur- chased or leased to relocate the depart- ment for the two years it would take to fully design, expand, and renovate the building.
In cases where there is ample land to expand horizontally, phasing is gener- ally possible. On tighter sites, a vertical
Keller, Texas Police Regional Facility
expansion, which requires removal of the existing roof and much more in the way of structural upgrades, will neces- sitate sending the department offsite for the duration of the project, and such re- lated costs must be factored in. It’s the hundreds of smaller ques- tions that quickly become the focus of facility needs assessments. To begin with, unlike many municipal facilities, police buildings are extraordinarily complex, technically, to plan. To offer a contrast, design of public schools adheres to state standards for every- thing from classroom square footage to the placement of sinks, and there are no ‘back of the house’ issues to deal with—and much less in the way of state-of-the-art technology. Once you know the number of rooms, the templates for public school stan- dards take over. Public safety buildings, on the other hand, have public and se- cure sides that must be integrated, as well as operational requirements that change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, depending on the size and growth of the community in question, specifi c en- forcement issues, local demographics, structure of local services, and many other unique characteristics. Planners thus have two divergent goals—to draw up a list of comparable
cities, with the purpose of suggesting general scope and square footage of potential facilities; and, at the same time, to identify the many singular aspects of police (and city) operations that will suggest multiple alternatives for each separate space in the facility, and the facility as a whole.
In the first case, demographic data is collected on current populations, pro- jections of population growth, local demographics including expectations for service, regional influences, and regional transportation networks, all of which will have an impact on the size and structure of police divisions. For example, two cities that are very comparable in terms of population size, density and cultural mix may diverge significantly just because of the presence, in one case, of a nearby larger city on a major highway or a lo- cation near an international border. Also serving to confound compara- bility will be the specific community’s culture and traditions, and the cur- rent organizational structure of its city agencies—a reason why the existence or performance of a citywide needs assessment is often another critical as- pect of public-safety facility planning. Among the common examples that will impact planning: An adjoining or
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