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HomeMy WebLinkAboutE911Minutes_2008_09_18East Central Communications Council Meeting City Hall meeting room September 18, 2008 8:30am Board members present: Dennis Falken(County Commission), Deanna Santema(County Commission), and Jeff Weldon(City Manager) Others present: Bryan Gums(BPD), Todd Struwe(Emergency Mgnt.), Jeff Miller(BPD), Darrell Hartmann(Fire Dept), Mark Stratton(Communications), Marty Stanwick(SO), and Bob Hill. Call to order: Meeting called to order by Dennis Falken. Deanna/Jeff Weldon moved to approve the minutes of the May 29, 2008 meeting. All present voted aye. Motion approved. Addition to the Agenda Bills Bryan went over the bills for the last quarter. Jeff Weldon/Deanna Santema made a motion to approve all nonrecurring bills. All present voted aye. Motion approved. Reports Dennis mentioned that this budget is confusing because there are two different budgets for 911. The E911 budget is to run 911 and city budget is to run dispatch . Dennis commented on the memo that Jeff Weldon sent out and said that the county doesn’t take any money out for the GIS. Jeff Weldon said that there is money that comes from the state that is used for GIS. The total revenue from the state is $247,000 from the phone company. Dennis said that is a revolving fund, the money just stays in there. All that money is budgeted into the 911 budget. We don’t take any money out and stick into our GIS budget line. That wasn’t Jeff Weldon’s understanding. He thought if you have $247,000 coming from the telcos to county and you forward $170,000 to the city for dispatch operations. Jeff said he saw GIS mapping expenses on the county’s budget under mapping and signage. Dennis said that there is $15,000 for mapping and signage. That is money that goes into the county highway dept. because they maintain the signs. So it’s just their expense. Jeff Weldon asked where is the revenue for that line item? Dennis said that it’s part of that $247,000. Deanna said it’s like the county is paying the bill to the highway department for the work that they did out of th e 911 budget. Dennis said there is money paid to the county for signage and mapping up keep, but it is billed out. Jeff Weldon said so it’s billed out to county operations. Dennis said yes, that’s right. Jeff Weldon said, so all the revenue isn’t going into dispatch. Dennis said yes. Dennis also mentioned that the only funds that come back to the county for reimbursement is the signage and mapping upkeep. Jeff Weldon asked how we differentiate supplies and materials. There is $3800 budgeted in the city’s budget and there is $1300 budgeted in the county’s 911 budget for supplies and materials Dennis said that Bryan has two budgets to choose from for supplies and materials along with repair and maintenance. There should be some thought as to how we want to handle this money because it’s two budgets doing the same operation. Maybe there should be a different way to take this money and put it in as revenue to the city. We should have more discussions about this. All this board wants is to know that this mone y is being spent for 911 and not to keep the city dispatch open. Dennis mentioned that the intent behind this budget was strictly for 911 services. So if you have repair and maintenance on something that was crucial to 911 it would come out of this budget. If it is something that was city general it would come out of the cities budget. If a repeater went down and is used half the time for 911 and half the time for general you can take half the cost from the 911 budget and the other half from the city’s budget. Dennis mentioned that Bryan doesn’t see the bill that comes across for the signage and upkeep. Larry turns the bills right into the auditor’s office and they turn around and pay the bill right out of that fund. Bryan said that it would be nice to k now of all bills. Dennis said that we should have more discussions about this. Dennis mentioned that Stephanie read Jeff Weldon’s memo and she said that she wants to make sure that the E911 board doesn’t think that the county is taking money out to run th e GIS. Jeff said that he was trying to explain to the county not all the money that is generated from the telco goes into dispatch. Deanna Santama said that it goes into the 911 budget. Dennis said that it’s still part of 911 as the signage and upkeep. Larry said the only GIS it’s related to is the Bullberry and that’s under another line. GIS is all Bullberry. The signage line that says mapping is when they had paper maps. Dennis said that we should change that line to say strictly signage. Jeff Weldon asked if the county puts any money into the E911 budget other than the money generated for the telcos? Dennis said no. Jeff said that the city puts in $226,000 to dispatch. Marty Stanwick mentioned that maybe it’s time to think of 911 being a separate entit y. Dennis said if we took 911 services and made it its separate entity and they would only answer 911 calls. They would be bored because we don’t have emergency calls stacked up. And we would still would have expenses for 24 hour services for walk in traffic after business hours, business and non emergency service calls. Dennis said that we would be duplicating services. Jeff said the point he is trying to make is there is revenue that is coming into the county from the phone companies. The city has no telco money coming in and we are reaching into our revenue stream $226,000 to run the operation. Dennis said that this money is going directly into the E911 fund the county doesn’t retain any of the money from telco. $170,000 and everything else except for the signage is given to the city to run the dispatch. All you do is take the $15000 out and everything else belongs to the city. It’s the $170,000 in revenue plus expenses the county is paying for. The county pays $3500 a month to BMU to provide data to dispatch. Some things are automatically paid by the county. Jeff Weldon is fine with the 911 budget, but his concern is he doesn’t think that the county is putting in enough money in from their budget. Dennis thinks that someday the county is going to have to put money in eventually because we are spending more than we are bringing in. Bryan mentioned that the annexing of the softball complex has been done. Mark Stratton had a question about Estelline. Who do we talk to for getting a radio and antenna set up so we can dispatch Estelline directly ourselves instead of going through Watertown? The reason being if an ambulance is coming into Brookings county we should be able to talk to them. Mark talked with Dave in Hamlin county and he is open to the discussion. Dennis said you should first get some estimates of the cost. Mark talked with Jay from Two Way Radio said that it would be about $1500- $2000 for a radio and directional antenna. Dennis said that Estelline would have to request it and give us their frequency. Jeff Miller mentioned that our memory storage in Justice is critically high and we need to off load it. The plan is to connect with the city server. The cost would be about $2500 to run a line over to the city server.. I bring this to the board because I don’t know if this is a city issue or a 911 issue. We share the same server with the Sheriff department. Dennis said that’s where it gets confusing because it’s a joint service. Jeff Weldon and Dennis made a motion to allocate $2500 to run a line over to the city server. All present voted aye. Motion approved. Darrell brought up mobile data terminals that we talked about since 2005. Darrell also mentioned that he talked with the Police Chief and the Sheriff about getting their frequency added to their command radios. We will need a letter to approve 6 radios the use of there frequencies. Because Darrell can’t legally put their frequencies into their radios without something in writing. Bob Hill mentioned that there is a new GIS guy starting. Bob also mentioned that there in the process of getting someone locally trained on the Bullberry. The next meeting is set for Thursday, January 22, 2009 at 8:30am Regular quarterly meetings are held in January, May and September. Budget meetings are held in June. Adjournment Submitted by Chris Larson