Crews at Round Rock's Public Safety Training Center have started paving a high-speed driving track and pouring a new concrete pad designed for practicing car-crash extrications, marking visible progress on a $44 million expansion that voters funded three years ago. The city issued an update on the project on August 11, confirming that workers have also framed and walled the new classroom and administration additions taking shape on the 73-acre campus.
The driving track and the extrication pad are two of the most anticipated pieces of the expansion, according to Community Impact, which reported that crews began paving the track over the summer while sections of concrete for the training pad are still being poured. The additional pad will let firefighters and police officers practice extricating people from car accidents, a skill that previously required travel outside the city. Adolfson & Peterson Construction, the contractor overseeing the build, began work on the expansion in February.
A Decade-Old Plan Finally Gets Built
The driving track and expanded classroom space were actually part of the training center's original 2013 master plan, but the city cut them before the facility opened in 2018 due to budget constraints, according to the City of Round Rock. That original 65,000-square-foot facility opened at 2801 N. Mays St. after voters approved a $29 million bond in 2013, and it already included an indoor shooting range and a five-story burn tower. Brinkley Sargent Wiginton Architects, the firm that designed that original building — including exterior panels colored to echo first responder uniforms — was retained to design the Phase 2 expansion as well.
Round Rock's City Council unanimously approved a $15.1 million construction contract with Adolfson & Peterson last September, selecting the firm out of seven competing proposals. The broader $44 million project is funded through Proposition B of the city's May 2023 general obligation bond election, which passed with 75.14% voter approval as part of a $274 million bond package. The city has estimated that package carries a maximum property tax rate impact of $0.069 per $100 valuation, or roughly $3 to $4 a month for a median homeowner, with the council setting the final rate annually during budget adoption.
More Classrooms For a Growing Department
Once complete, the expansion will add a standalone 4,700-square-foot classroom building with two classrooms, restrooms, storage, and a kitchenette, pushing the facility's total classroom count from three to five and its student capacity to roughly 200 people. Between 2018 and 2025, the Round Rock Police Department and Round Rock Fire Department each grew by more than 50 personnel as the city's population expanded past 140,000 residents, per Community Impact's earlier reporting. Fire Chief Shane Glaiser has noted that existing classrooms were regularly filled to capacity.
The project also includes a 6,602-square-foot expansion of the main administration building, adding more than 6,000 square feet of meeting space and extra offices for fire training staff. Technical additions planned for the site include an observation tower, storage sheds for fire and police vehicles, and a backup generator large enough to power the administration building during outages.
What's Left Before Completion
The city says interior and exterior finish-out work is planned to continue through the end of 2026, with the full expansion expected to be complete in early 2027. Hoodline previously reported on the council's contract approval for the project last fall.
City officials have framed the completed campus as a way to keep officers and firefighters training in Round Rock rather than traveling elsewhere for mandatory driving courses, cutting travel and lodging costs while positioning the city as a regional training hub for surrounding agencies. With the track now being paved and the extrication pad taking shape, that decade-old vision from the 2013 master plan is finally moving toward completion.
