Municipal officials throughout the country are quietly rethinking where and how to best deliver public services. Instead of maintaining a patchwork of aging city halls, police stations, fire departments, courts, dispatch centers, and administrative offices that are all scattered, city leaders are consolidating functions into fewer expanded and modernized facilities. The reasons are practical, increasingly urgent, and related to escalating costs.
Public buildings in the past were designed for smaller populations, fewer services, and older legal standards. Now city officials struggle with space constraints, deferred maintenance, energy inefficiency, accessibility requirements that cannot be met, and new public safety requirements. The consolidation trend is showing up in both fast-growing metros and smaller communities to solve these problems but also because of expectations expressed by local taxpayers – “provide more services, improve service quality, but don’t raise our taxes.”
The examples emerging to comply with these requests and also with new legal standards are why cities are moving toward co-located police, fire, emergency management, citizen services, and other related operations.
Many city leaders are also studying the costs of new facilities versus repurposing existing older buildings. Austin, for instance, found that the cost of repurposing an existing building to consolidate public safety headquarters would significantly reduce costs. This kind of comparison is becoming common and rather than funding entirely new campuses, government officials are frequently pursuing adaptive reuse of existing structures to speed delivery, reduce cost risk, and limit disruption. Tulsa, Oklahoma also took this approach by purchasing a former insurance building and then designing renovations to consolidate multiple emergency-response functions under one roof – a model that also supported real-time coordination and shared technology investments.
Municipal consolidation is not limited to emergency services. City governments are also consolidating front-counter services including billing, courts, permitting, administrative offices because citizens increasingly expect a “one-stop” experience. In Richmond, Texas, local leaders approved a project intended to centralize core city services into a reworked city hall facility with added capacity for civic functions and emergency operations. Even when voters resist large price tags, the trend doesn’t necessarily stop, instead it often shifts into scope reductions, phased programs, and redesigns intended to retain the consolidation concept while cutting square footage and hard costs.
The costs of aging infrastructure are being escalated by climate change and resilience demands. National assessments continue to emphasize that aging systems are increasingly vulnerable to disasters and extreme weather, and that results in higher risk exposure and unpredictable repair costs.
Costs for providing citizen services, especially labor-heavy services, are another reason to consolidate operations. Local budgets are usually dominated by public safety and basic operations, leaving limited flexibility for facilities spread across too many addresses. Consolidation can also make it easier to add citizen-facing improvements, extended service hours, accessible meeting space, integrated call centers, etc. because staffing and security can be shared. The following upcoming projects described confirm that the effort of upgrading municipal facilities includes very common, shared objectives.
City leaders in Snohomish, Washington, will launch a $45 million project to construct a new public safety and city services building. The project will relocate staff and equipment currently spread across multiple ageing and outdated facilities into a single new and modernized civic center. The 42,000-square-foot facility will be designed to upgrade service delivery and provide significantly improved long-term operational efficiency. It will anchor the campus, housing administrative offices, shared council and board chambers, community meeting rooms, and the police department. Additional campus components include a fleet maintenance building, a vehicle storage facility, EV charging infrastructure, emergency generators, and a new public plaza overlooking the Pilchuck River. Consolidating these municipal functions onto one campus will streamline city operations and provide residents with a more accessible hub for public services.
The design and permitting work will continue through 2025 and procurement solicitation documents anticipated soon after that. Construction is scheduled to begin in early 2027. A related but separately funded project to construct a new fire department headquarters and two additional new stations will also locate them in the civic center, creating a fully integrated public safety and municipal services district.
The city of Overland Park, Kansas, has $109 million to invest in a project to construct a new, consolidated city hall. Currently municipal service services are delivered out of two separate buildings. More space is needed, and the older facilities are not only inefficient and costly, ADA legal compliance can no longer meet guidelines.
City officials recently purchased property to locate the new city hall. It is centrally located and will provide space for the city to consolidate all municipal departments, including the city manager’s office, the finance department, technology division and human resource operations. It will allow for more interaction, deliver greater efficiency and allow for the improvement of citizen services.
The city also has plans for a $86.5 million renovation of a 154,000-square-foot, seven-story building that will be designed to create additional office space, add a council chamber, and expand training and educational areas. All floors in the repurposed facility will receive ADA improvements and modernized workspaces. Design work will begin in 2026. Because this city initiative is large, a phased construction delivery will be announced before solicitations begin. At this time, no delivery model has been announced but that is anticipated soon.
A $48 million new city hall for Florence, Alabama, is planned. It will be located on property designated for the city’s long-term municipal campus location. Midway through 2025, city leaders selected an architectural team to begin developing concepts for a modern, four-story, 70,000-plus-square-foot facility to replace the current aging building now in use. The new facility will consolidate core administrative offices into a single, efficient hub.
Early plans for this project outline a state-of-the-art municipal center to house city services, the mayor’s office, city clerk’s division, finance, human resources, IT, community development, and other key departments. Additionally, at the site of a former downtown parking deck, the proposed facility will anchor a more cohesive civic campus footprint, enhance customer service flow, and provide public meeting spaces. According to municipal officials, the new city hall is crucial to increasing capacity, improving accessibility, and modernizing how the city delivers its daily services.
Delivery will occur in phases over several years as the design phase progresses. The design and permitting phase will continue through 2026 and procurement solicitations will be released as soon as those efforts are concluded.
City officials in Greeley, Colorado, have also announced plans to establish a consolidated downtown civic campus. The $573 million initiative will replace the current 50-year-old city hall and centralize major municipal services into one area to improve operational efficiency and reduce long-term maintenance liabilities.
When completed, three primary buildings will be delivered: a modernized city hall, a judicial complex, and a school district administration building. The municipal facility will be designed to streamline municipal operations and consolidate currently dispersed departments into a single updated campus. Adjacent to city hall, the judicial complex will serve as a courthouse and administrative center that provides city staff efficient workspaces to support district operations.
Other components of the project include the development of new public green spaces, a civic plaza for community events, and an expanded parking area. City officials are currently anticipating even more strategic land-use opportunities as space is provided for private-sector developments in the area. With the project currently in the design phase, construction is expected to begin in March 2026.
Looking toward 2026 and beyond, consolidation is expected to escalate even more. Facility consolidation is less of a trend and more of a service delivery strategy. It’s a way to modernize aging, code-challenged buildings while responding to the public’s demand for speed, transparency, and convenience. Over the next decade, more municipalities will likely measure success not by how many buildings they own, but by how effectively a smaller number of facilities can deliver reliable, compliant, and affordable public services.
Photo by Canva
This story is a part of the weekly Texas Government Insider digital news publication. See more of the latest Texas government news here. For more national government news, check Government Market News daily for new stories, insights and profiles from public sector professionals.
