Krum, Texas spent decades as a quiet farming community on the rural fringe of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The city's population has roughly doubled since 2010, now topping an estimated 8,000 residents, and its public safety infrastructure has not kept pace. That is about to change.
The city is moving forward with its first purpose-built combined public safety facility, a single building on a 4-acre site on Masch Branch Road that will bring fire, police and EMS operations together under one roof for the first time. The planned facility would include apparatus bays, firefighter living quarters, turnout gear storage and decontamination areas, secure evidence storage, an emergency communications hub, and shared training and fitness space. The site's location on Krum's growing edge suggests city planners are sizing the project for where the city is heading, not where it has been.
Krum's situation mirrors that of several neighboring small cities caught in the same northward surge of DFW suburbanization. Towns like Aubrey, Sanger, Justin and Pilot Point have all recently broken ground on or opened similar combined facilities as their fire and police departments, built for communities a fraction of their current size, strain to meet modern standards. Those standards now include dedicated decontamination spaces for firefighter cancer prevention and secure evidence storage required by contemporary chain-of-custody rules, amenities that older facilities simply were not designed to accommodate.
The combined facility model has become the go-to approach for fast-growing exurban Texas cities because it allows smaller departments to share costs for training rooms, fitness areas and infrastructure they could not individually afford to build separately.
The city is using a Construction Manager at Risk approach for the project, a procurement method common in Texas for complex public buildings. It gives the city a contractor involved from the design phase onward and provides more cost certainty than a traditional competitive bid. No construction budget has been publicly disclosed.
Key financing questions also remain open. It is not yet clear whether the project will be funded through a general obligation bond, certificates of obligation, or another mechanism, and no voter referendum has been publicly announced. How EMS services will be structured, whether city-operated or contracted and simply housed in the building, is also unresolved.
The project is posted on the city's bidding page, with Fire Chief Adam North leading the procurement. Sealed submittals are due by 10 a.m. local time June 23, 2026.
