What Public Safety Agencies Are Prioritizing for Next Fiscal Year’s Budget

Last Updated: September 2026

🔎In this article: Agencies heading into a new fiscal year are funding three things: visibility into their own operation, roadside safety, and fewer disconnected systems. Here is what I am hearing, and where towing programs fit.

Budget season forces clarity. It is the one time of year nobody gets to be vague.

I have spent most of my career in the automotive realm and the businesses next to it. Different industries, but I see the same pattern every time. The performance nobody is capturing is sitting in the basics. And public safety is no exception.

When agency leaders and finance teams sit down to plan next year’s spend, they are not comparing feature lists. They are asking three questions:

1. What is putting our people at risk right now?
2. What is costing us time and money?
3. What do we not know about how this department actually runs?

I am in the room for these conversations and planning sessions a lot, alongside the Autura government solution engineers. The chatter clusters around three themes I keep hearing...

1. Real-time towing program operation analytics and visibility is a must

Agencies want to measure what is working. They cannot keep doing it by hand.

When a chief asks how the towing program performed last quarter, coming up with the answer takes somebody two days and a spreadsheet. That is not a reporting preference. That is a gap.

Here is what falls into it:

• Response times that slipped because dispatch took four steps instead of one
• A community complaint about a contracted tow, with no record to check it against
• A resident calling for the third time to find their own vehicle
• A tow provider convinced the rotation is not fair, and nobody able to prove otherwise

You cannot fix any of that by just adding more people to chase down that information. So agencies are funding tools that capture the data on their own, report in ways a human can actually use, and land on a dashboard somebody will look at on a Tuesday morning.

Towing belongs in that picture. When dispatch, impound, and rotation records sit in paper logs or systems not everyone can see, they are invisible to every analytics dollar the agency just spent. Bring towing in and you improve the program and the agency’s data posture at the same time.

2. Roadside safety, for officers and for tow operators is paramount

This one is at the top of the list every year. And it should be. According to NIOSH, 496 officers died in motor vehicle related incidents between 2014 and 2023. That is 29% of all line of duty deaths in that stretch, excluding COVID. 154 of those were struck-by fatalities – officers officers hit while outside the vehicle. And traffic-related line-of-duty deaths, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF), continue to be a leading cause of law enforcement officer deaths. Struck-by fatalities are still making up a significant portion of those deaths. These are trends we must work to bring down with more urgency.

An officer a week, for ten straight years. And tow operators are dying out there, too. They do not get a memorial week. Policy has not moved these numbers on its own. Safety is not what is written in the policy manual. It is what the operation tolerates day to day. The agencies making progress are doing two things:

1. Looking honestly at the conditions that put people on the white line
2. Asking what they can actually change

Scene time is the clearest answer. The longer an officer stands on a roadside shoulder waiting for a tow that was dispatched by phone and tracked by nobody, the longer the exposure window.

That is what makes towing technology a safety investment instead of an efficiency project:

• Officers request a tow directly instead of routing through dispatch, and trucks are tracked live ➡️ Response times drop.
• Officers get real ETAs on their phone and logphotos, notes, and impound details in one place  Better information, betterscene decisions.
• Tows arrive faster because dispatch is location-based ➡️ Officers, operators, and motorists are able to leave dangerous incident scenes sooner.

Every minute off that clock is a minute nobody is standing next to live traffic.

Related: How Utah Highway Patrol Reduced Tow Response Times by 50%

3. One system of record (not five) is essential

Buying best-in-class for every function and hoping the pieces talk to each other does not work. Research published recently found 78% of federal agencies run at least five disconnected major data systems. And 42% run more than fifteen. Local agencies are no better off. Towing lives in one system, CAD in another, records management in a third, finance in a fourth. This leaves teams:

• Blind across departments
• Guessing at program performance
• Keying the same record into three places
• Unable to find the root cause of problems the community is already complaining about

Related: Breaking Down Government Agency Data Silos with Modern Technology

Zoom in on the towing program and it gets concrete. Dispatch in one place, fleet tracking in another, impound in a third. Officers get conflicting information. Supervisors cannot see the whole scene. Data that should move on its own gets reconciled by hand on Friday afternoon.

So the budget priority is integration. One platform across the full lifecycle, connected to what the agency already runs: request intake, dispatch, live tracking, impound including private property, owner notification, and reporting.

There is a second benefit, and you will hear the word plenty this year. Consolidation. Five point solutions means five vendors, five contracts, five support numbers, five training programs. The agencies making this move are seeing it in operational performance and in administrative overhead both.

Related: Read how Fort Wayne, Indiana is strengthening public services

Where towing modernization delivers on all three needs

Visibility: Every request, assignment, status update, and impound record captured automatically. Response times, call volume, rotation distribution, ready when somebody asks instead of two days later.

Safety: Faster dispatch, live truck tracking, automated notifications. Less time on the shoulder for officers, less time on status calls for dispatchers. That is a safety outcome, with documented precedent at agencies around the country.

Integration: Towing management that connects to the CAD and records systems you already run. Tow providers work in the same platform, which kills the radio and phone relay between dispatch, the officer, and the tow company. Your team finds unclaimed vehicle storage locations in seconds, automates processing fees, runs lien and notification workflows, and gives residents a self-service way to find their own vehicle.

4 Actions that help get a request for modernization funded

I consistently witness the public safety agency leaders who win these internal arguments are doing the same four things. They:

1. Start with the problem, not the product: Quantify what is broken before you name a vendor.
2. Tie operational data to safety outcomes: Where the connection is real, make it. Safety moves budget.
3. Name who else benefits: A request that helps three departments beats one that helps just one.
4. Paint a real implementation picture: Procurement, rollout, adoption, honest timelines from your vendors. The time-to-value question is coming. Have the answer.

Why this matters

We wrote our Autura mission down this year:

We drive integrity, compliance, and efficiency in towing and recovery, so communities keep moving, lives are saved, and people get home.

That is not a poster in a hallway. It is the same three things agencies are putting in next year’s budget.

1. Integrity and compliance, meaning a towing program you can see is a towing program you can defend – to a chief, council, or community member who believes his or her vehicle was unfairly taken away.
2. Lives saved, meaning every minute off a scene is a minute people are no longer standing next to live traffic.
3. Efficiency, meaning fewer systems, handoffs, and people keying the same towing and vehicle records twice.

None of that is about software.

Want to talk through what this looks like for your agency? We have solution engineers with decades in this work who will help you frame the problem and build the case, whether or not it ends with us.

Let’s Roll!

Rudy