At a special meeting of what is also known as the 911 governing board, the new director of the center, Chris Freeman, said he had planned to bring this up at the next regularly scheduled meeting. After a recent incident when someone came into the fire department, which adjoins within the same building, who was having some violent tendencies, he decided perhaps it should be addressed sooner.
Although some security measures are in place, they needed to be beefed up some, he said.
“According to the NCIC rules and things of that nature, we have to get locked down a little bit better than we are,” he said. “I went ahead and got quotes. I've been working on this since the middle of October.”
Other recent shooting events around the country added to his sense of needing it done sooner, Freeman said.
Freeman he had received pricing from four companies, and he said some would require subcontracts with separate companies for maintenance and some had monthly fees.
“The only two that really fit the bill for being a totally maintained system were these two,” he said, naming SCRTC first and then summarizing the others.
With SCRTC, he would have access to the system to immediately produce new badges for new employees or remove access for former ones, for example, instead of being at someone else's mercy and having to wait for it to be done.
Sonitrol was going to cost a little less initially, but it had some other fees attached for maintenance and certain things he could do himself, he said.
AAA Systems was “the steepest one,” coming in at around $12,000, and its camera system would have to be completely different because it wouldn't integrate with the existing one. A quote from Startel did not include a camera system but the one from SCRTC did, and it would add another camera in the radio room for video only. The SCRTC quote was a bit less than $10,000 overall, with a maintenance/service-call cost at $72 per hour, billed in 15-minute increments.
And SCRTC already has other cameras there, so it would be easy for it to integrate another in the radio room.
The pricing includes getting a particular door between the departments locked down, with badge access only, so the dispatchers could go back and forth but not just anyone could go into the emergency communications center. An intercom tied into the phone system will also be installed at the Washington Street entrance to the dispatch center so personnel can find out more about why a person is there before opening the door. Other measures are included as well.
Glasgow Police Department Chief Guy Howie said that SCRTC has been very responsive – “Johnny on the spot” – to questions and handling issues as the need arose while they were incorporating a new phone system. On the other hand, the GPD has a fire alarm system with Startel, and the response was delayed significantly.
“I couldn't get them to come out for weeks and weeks,” Howie said, adding that eventually the issue did get resolved. “In our line of work, we can't wait around and beg people to come out and service us. We have to have some reasonable response to get things done.”With seven of the 10 voting members present, the choice of SCRTC was unanimous after a motion by Barren County Judge-Executive Micheal Hale to go with the company and discussion of the differences between the companies' products and pricing.
©2017 the Glasgow Daily Times (Glasgow, Ky.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
