From January 12-16, 2025, the Southlake Fire Department will be hosting an Accreditation Assessment Team from the Center for Public Safety Excellence/Commission on Fire Accreditation International (CPSE/CFAI). This team will be composed of four peer assessors from other Fire Departments throughout the country.

The accreditation process is a means of establishing industry-wide measures to determine and evaluate the level of overall organizational performance. Once every five years, the Fire Department is required to go through an on-site peer assessment to determine the departments’ ongoing compliance with 11 main categories. Contained within the 10th edition FESSAM categories are 46 criterions, each of which is further broken down into 250 detailed performance indicators. The result creates what is known as the “self-assessment manual” for fire services.

The assessment will be conducted at our FD Headquarters with the Fire Chief's Conference Room serving as the primary file validation and verification location. Assessors will start arriving on Sunday, January 12, 2025, and depart by the afternoon of Thursday, January 16, 2025. In addition to file validation and verification, the assessors will be conducting interviews, tours of our city, facilities, and mutual aid locations.

The Fire Department is looking forward to hopefully receiving a recommendation of reaccreditation by the peer assessment team for its 5th five-year term.