The topic came up during the Tuesday meeting of the MECCA 911 Policy Board.
Since May 2014, the agency has used SafeTown as a means to send out incident alerts over the Internet, including the Community Alerts web site that can be viewed by the public.
MECCA 911 director Mike Wolfe said SafeTown is a product of InterAct, a company that has provided computer aided dispatch (CAD) equipment to the county for the past 15 years. However, the upgrade last year has resulted in problems.
Although there haven’t been any issues with people making 911 calls, Wolfe said dispatchers have had difficulty managing and distributing call records between police and fire departments. He said the problem has persisted since May 2014.
The agency has reached out to InterAct to fix the problem but little progress was made, he said.
Wolfe also said InterAct was bought out by a larger company four months ago, and many of the technicians and staff MECCA worked with in the past are no longer there.
Wolfe made a motion for the board to search for a new vendor to replace the InterAct SafeTown system, which was supported by other board members.
“We’ve been messing with this for far too long,” WVU Police Chief Bob Roberts said.
Wolfe said several other vendors are being considered to replace the system.
“Now that we have that approval to move forward we’ll put out a request for purchase to meet the needs that we have,” Wolfe said. “What we have asked from many of the other CAD vendors is something more like the old system that provided more accurate information that showed what was happening, who is responding to it. We want to be able to provide the most information we’re allowed to provide.”
The current SafeTown live incident system uses an interface similar to Google Maps to show where an incident is taking place and when it was reported, but it doesn’t show which department is responding and the incident location isn’t always precise.
For the past few weeks, the interface hasn’t displayed any incident information. Wolfe said this is another reason to replace the current system.
While the older display system didn’t include a map, it did show which department responded to an incident, and the address at which it was reported.
Wolfe said he would like to see the agency return to this type system, while having the ability to send out alerts via text messages. He also said the county hasn’t paid anything for the 2014 upgrade because the contact hasn’t been met.
The new CAD system’s cost could vary from $400,000-$500,000, which would be paid for with a lease purchase over time. Wolfe said it will take about six months to get a new system up and running. This would only be for record keeping, and would not affect the current 911 system or how emergency calls are processed.
In other policy board business, Wolfe suggested merging mass notification systems between the county and the City of Morgantown, which now use different systems. He said merging them under the new Everbridge would reduce the time to alert different communities of an emergency.
Wolfe also noted these notifications could be sent out by phone, email, text message, social media, radio and television.
MECCA 911 assistant director Jim Smith also reported the agency had about $10,000 in carryover from last year’s budget. “We finished to the positive so that’s a plus,” he said.
©2015 The Dominion Post (Morgantown, W.Va.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
