One of North Texas’ premier police training facilities will soon be right down the street.
The city of University Park is converting the building at 5620 Fondren Drive — which once housed a wrestling gym — into a state-of-the art center for its 42 sworn officers.
When the facility is complete in the spring of 2026, it will include space to securely store evidence, a classroom, an area for defensive-tactics training, and emergency-use bunks and showers. The building will also be the new home of the city’s motorcycle officers, who currently work out of University Park’s Peek Service Center.
At the heart of the project is a six-lane shooting range, and the officers who practice in it won’t just be standing behind a firing line.
Officers will be able to use anchor points across the range’s floor to position obstacles and create a variety of different shooting environments. During one training session, they could shoot from barricaded positions. In another, they might manufacture rooms to practice tactics and how to safely enter spaces.
The project will be “huge for the police department,” assistant chief for operations Nelson Walter said.
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The new facility, he explained, will centralize storage that the department currently monitors, audits, and inspects in different offsite locations. While University Park officers now need to travel to Midlothian or McKinney to train with firearms, the Fondren facility is about a 10-minute drive from the police department.
The facility won’t only be more convenient. It will also enable the department to manage and design a training environment to suit the needs of its officers, who will be able to develop expertise in skills, such as martial arts-based defensive tactics, that require consistent practice.
Walter said that the UP police department hopes to open the doors of the facility to its Park Cities partner agencies, including the Highland Park, SMU, and Highland Park ISD police.
“If there’s a big event, then we’re all responding to it together,” he explained. “Why not have an opportunity to train together?”
The city has allocated $4.5 million toward construction of the new facility, but it is expected to cost less than that. The money comes from the SMU Land Sale Reserve, which was established in 2009 when the city sold $15.8 million in property to SMU for the George W. Bush Presidential Center and other campus improvements.
University Park police officers visited modern gun ranges in other cities while developing plans for the project. When work began in July, CGC General Contractors took down all but three exterior walls, the building’s roof, and its foundation.
The newly reconstructed space will include features specific to its use, such as steel beams to support a 17,000-pound rooftop air return unit, an expanded HVAC mechanical room with specialized equipment, impact resistant drywall, and stainless steel security mesh behind the drywall around the vault and evidence room, site superintendent Dan Ferguson told mayor Tommy Stewart and city council members during an Oct. 24 tour.
Ferguson called his work on the facility a “passion project.”
“My father-in-law was a sheriff for many years, and he would always come home complaining about the local gun training facilities,” Ferguson remembered. “I wish he were alive to see this. This would make him proud.”
