Tarrant County to reconsider plans for new law enforcement training center

Tarrant County will reconsider its plans for building a law enforcement training center during Tuesday’s commissioners meeting.

Commissioners will vote on a proposal to amend the county’s feasibility study with Fort Worth-based Komatsu Architecture to look into new options for building the center. None of the three options commissioners will consider include building a training center like what was originally planned.

But building a new center isn’t off the table, commissioner Manny Ramirez told the Star-Telegram Friday afternoon.

A new center with a gun range will cost $60 million to $75 million, said Ramirez, the former Fort Worth police union president and proponent of the center.

The options commissioners will explore are supposed to help the county figure out a way to approach training options for sheriff’s office employees in a more fiscally responsible way.

Throughout the planning process, Ramirez’s vision has changed.

The goal wasn’t to build a “Taj Mahal” center, Ramirez said, but to improve training, education and preparedness in a fiscally responsible way.

“We’ve got to leverage resources that we have in our community already,” Ramirez said. “And so it makes a whole heck of a lot of sense to explore these opportunities to partner with great organizations. And, you know, if we can create a world class training model at half the cost, and that’s what we have to explore.”

The first option commissioners will look into is keeping training operations at the sheriff’s office center at Resource Connection in southwest Fort Worth. That plan would include renovating or expanding the building to meet programming needs and possibly building a firing range.

The second option is blending training at Resource Connection and the law enforcement center at the Tarrant County College District Northwest Campus,. As a part of that plan, commissioners would also evaluate building an indoor firing range at the TCC campus.

The third option is moving training operations from Resource Connection to the TCC Northwest Campus, as well as expanding the Northwest Criminal Justice Center and Northwest Police Firing Range to include shared meeting and training spaces, an indoor gun range, mock village, mock jail cells, weight room, classrooms, lockers and restrooms, according to agenda documents.

The change to the feasibility study’s scope, which was originally approved in March, will cost taxpayers an additional $120,798.

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare and county administrator G.K. Maenius did not immediately return requests for comment on the new plans.

County leaders initially wanted to build a center for training new employees at the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office. It would include meeting and training spaces, an indoor firearms range, an armory, quartermaster’s space, an emergency vehicle track course, office space, locker rooms, classrooms, storage rooms and briefing spaces.

The plan has come under fire from community activists and Democratic members of the commissioners court who question whether building a new facility will help detention officer retention efforts.

As of Aug. 1, Tarrant County was 235 detention officers short.

In the last few months, county leaders have made moves to help address the shortage by hiring a firm to help search for job candidates and creating a temporary position within the sheriff’s office that would make recommendations on filling vacancies, among its many duties.