“You play like you practice,” DPS Director Steve McCraw told budget officials last month. “You need to practice in a real environment.” Story by TexasTribune.
If fully funded over the next three budget cycles, the training academy in Williamson County would cost $1.2 billion and eventually include dormitories, a cafeteria and other elements, said Director Steve McCraw, seen on Jan. 27 in Weslaco.The Texas Department of Public Safety wants $1.
The $1.2 billion project figure does not appear in the agency’s legislative appropriations request, which comes at a time when agencies are making their bids for a share of a historic state cash surplus in the next biennium — and against the backdrop of an emotional debate over what the state needs to do to prevent more mass killings.
He did not specify whether the center would charge fees for other law enforcement agencies to use the facility, if it would draw down any federal funding or what it would cost to run the center beyond the six-year construction budget. The proposal comes as the agency faces heavy criticism over its response to the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde in May, when officers from several agencies including the DPS tookThe proposed active-shooter facility was part of a presentation made by McCraw to captains at the Texas Highway Patrol, an arm of the DPS, according to meeting minutes obtained by The Texas Tribune.
The Texas State University ALERRT center runs some training sessions at the Williamson County complex already, with onePete Blair, executive director of the ALERRT center at Texas State, said his San Marcos facility is used for several types of first-responder training as well as active-shooter training on site.
Most of the quarter-million first responders the Texas ALERRT center has worked with in the past two decades were trained somewhere besides the Texas State center in San Marcos, Blair said.
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