BOC Approves Bid for E-911 Center Equipment

In the regular scheduled meeting of the Gilmer County Board of Commissioners (BOC) on June 11, 2009 the BOC acted on a recommendation by Sheriff, Stacy Nicholson and approved a bid of $676,514.00 for the equipment for the new E-911 Center that will be housed on the lower level of the new Courthouse (Phase II).

As first reported here, on May 25, 2009, the BOC decided to move forward with the new E-911 Center and finish the construction of the interior of the center with County employees. Concurrent with that, advertisements were let for the new E-911 equipment that includes: Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD), phone system, radio equipment, recording equipment and the console furniture that will house the equipment. Sheriff Nicholson indicated that “the bids contain everything necessary to operate the E-911 Center except the chairs and the people to sit in them.” He followed that up with the caveat that “we will need to spend an additional $5,000 to $10,000 on an “uninterrupted power supply” unit.

Three bids were obtained for the equipment and Interact was selected as the provider. Interact is the company that the County currently works with and it was felt by both the BOC and Sheriff that, even though their bid was approximately $2,300 higher than the lowest bid received, the transition to the new Center will be much smoother using Interact. Sheriff Nicholson cautioned that moving to another company may be problematic with maintaining all of the history on the system. He further indicated that being able to maintain the history files “out-weighed” any other “bells and whistles” that one of the other systems might have.

Funds for the new E-911 system will come from the SPLOST backed bonds that were sold by the Building Authority for the construction of Phase II of the Court House. Originally, the completion of the E-911 Center was not anticipated due to cost. However, when the bids were obtained for the parking lots the cost savings was sufficient to cover the new Center. This coupled with the fact that the equipment the County now uses in the existing Center is antiquated and soon will no longer be supported by Interact were driving factors in getting the new Center up and running in 2009.