New $370M Texas emergency operations, headquarters facility to be built near Austin airport

Skye Seipp and Tony Plohetski, Austin American-Statesman
Updated ·2 min read

The Texas A&M University System board of regents voted Thursday to begin building a new $370 million State Emergency Operations Center near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

The project will include the new headquarters for the Texas Division of Emergency Management, one of several state agencies overseen by the Texas A&M University System.

The headquarters will allow the agency to "consolidate its staff" members who are "scattered" across the state and "coordinate statewide emergency response efforts from a single location," Texas A&M Chancellor John Sharp said in a news release shared exclusively with the American-Statesman.

Construction is expected to begin this month and be completed in 2026.

The investment will allow Texas to "increase its capabilities to better prepare for, respond to, recover from and mitigate against any disaster we face,” Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said in the news release. “Communication and coordination are cornerstones of emergency management, and our new facilities will provide TDEM and our emergency management partners with the space and technology to more effectively serve our communities across Texas.”

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Of the $370 million to build the new center, $9.7 million will be used for land acquisition. The rest will be used to build the nearly 300,000-square-foot facility, which officials said will include a five-story office building.

Part of the facility will include a 90,000-square-foot State Emergency Operations Center, which will be used to coordinate disaster response with leaders from across the state. This portion will be able to seat 300 people, withstand 200-mph winds and act as the hub for planning the state's response to disasters.

The original state emergency response center was built in the 1950s and is an underground bunker in North Austin. The new center will allow the state to modernize the site where it coordinates its disaster response, said Wes Rapaport, a spokesperson for the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

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"The 70-year-old facility is no longer suitable to support emergency response operations for a growing state," the news release states.

Design of the new facility has been underway for years, according to the news release.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: New Texas emergency operations facility set to be built in Austin