Alamance Community College is nearing completion of its $19.9 million Public Safety Training Center in Green Level, which is targeted to open in the summer of 2025.
The Public Safety Training Center is currently under construction near the southwest corner of the intersection of N.C. Highway 49 and Sandy Cross Road. Once complete, the facility will house ACC programs that provide training for future law enforcement, emergency medical personnel, and fire-fighters.
Tom Hartman, associate vice president of administrative services and facilities for ACC, told the community college’s trustees Monday night that the college expects to receive a temporary certificate of occupancy for the 15,000-square foot classroom building at the Public Safety Training Center site in late February 2025.
The brick exterior of the classroom building is complete, and interior walls are about 80 percent complete, Hartman said Monday night. Finishes such as lighting, plumbing fixtures, and flooring are scheduled to be complete within the next month, he said.
Photos of current status of Public Safety Training Center in Green Level
ACC hopes to receive temporary occupancy certificates for a burn tower that will be used for firefighter training and for an indoor firing range in late spring of 2025, Hartman told ACC’s trustees during his latest update on the construction of the Public Safety Training Center.
However, ACC officials, citing problems with water pressure at the property in Green Level, later sought to relocate the site of the burn tower to Burlington’s existing Fire/Police Training Center at 128 Stone Quarry Road in Haw River. Following several months of negotiations, ACC’s trustees approved a lease for a portion of the property along Stone Quarry Road in December 2023 to build a multi-level burn training tower. (Burlington’s city council also approved the agreement with ACC in January 2024).
ACC is leasing 96 acres in Green Level, the main site of the Public Safety Training Center, from Martin Marietta Materials of Raleigh for $18,917 per year, starting in the fourth year of a 50-year lease. The Raleigh firm has agreed to let ACC use the property at no cost for the first three years.
The classroom building is situated on a 57.5-acre portion of the Green Level site; a 33.5-acre portion of the property, made up of swampland, will be used for search and rescue training exercises, in keeping with the terms of the lease with Martin Marietta.
Construction of the Public Safety Training Center has largely been funded by the $39.6 million bond package that voters approved for ACC in November 2018.
In addition to the initial $12.4 million in bond proceeds set aside for construction of the new facility, ACC also received $500,000 in federal stimulus funding through the American Rescue Plan to extend water and sewer lines to the site.
The water and sewer tie-ins are expected to be complete within the next 30 days, Hartman said Monday night.
Alamance County’s commissioners also allocated an additional $2.5 million for the Public Safety Training Center in early 2022 to cover cost overruns that ACC officials had attributed at the time to inflation in labor and building materials. And in 2023, the General Assembly allocated another $5.3 million in nonrecurring funding to help cover costs for construction of the indoor firing range planned for the Green Level site.
ACC’s trustees hired Moseley Architects to design the new facility and Greensboro-based Samet Corporation to serve as the construction-manager-at-risk (or CM at risk) to ensure that the Public Safety Training Center is completed on time and within the final project budget.
ACC officials had hosted state and county officials for a ceremonial “beam-signing” this summer to celebrate the placement of the final steel girder for the Public Safety Training Center.
