Milpitas City Council voted 4-0 Oct. 4 to authorize the city manager to sign a memorandum of understanding between the City of Milpitas and City of Campbell for shared use of a public safety computer aided dispatch system currently operated by Milpitas Police Department.
Developed by Tritech Software Systems, Milpitas police have been using the Tritech CAD to dispatch and manage 911 calls for police and fire service for the past eight years.
“We have been operating a CAD system that we’ve been very happy with,” Milpitas police Capt. Armando Corpuz said after the meeting. “The 911 call data does not include phone calls that come in on the non-emergency line. I can add that we collect the number of ‘events’ in our CAD system.”
He noted the events include nearly all activity police staff initiates or calls to which police respond.
“That said, we had 77,223 events in 2015 and 75,338 events in 2014,” Corpuz added.
Saying Milpitas’ CAD system can host other law enforcement agencies for its use, Corpuz said. He added under the still developing agreement with Campbell police in that agency will be able to remotely connect to the Milpitas police CAD in order to dispatch police services for Campbell.
City reports state Campbell will have a separate contract and statement of work with Tritech Software Systems. In addition, Campbell will pay Tritech for all integration costs associated with getting its system “live.”
“This joint use will provide some cost savings to both cities,” Corpuz said. “City of Campbell will be equally sharing the costs.”
He added both cities will share the cost for hardware for future upgrades.
“Those upgrades happen about every six years,” Corpuz said, noting Campbell may share a $10,000 cost for such upgrades.
Under the proposed agreement, for the use of Milpitas’ CAD system, Campbell will reimburse the city roughly $27,000 for the 2016-17 fiscal year, city reports state.
According to city reports, Milpitas and Campbell have had many meetings with Tritech to work through system design and technical details to ensure successful implementation.
“We haven’t even come up with the business rules yet,” Corpuz said, noting those rules would govern how the joint system is implemented and how each police department may or may not interface with one another. “The goal is to get it up and running…we’re not in a rush. We’ve been working on this project for over a year.”
He added there was no hard date for the agreement or the new joint use CAD system to begin.
“But if I had to guess, the system will be live by early next year,” Corpuz said.
Councilwoman Debbie Indihar Giordano was absent from the Oct. 4 council meeting.
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