10-05-16 Health and Public Safety

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and they are starting to incur those problems. We have a lot of failures with the current radio system because it is controlled by telephone lines which are subject to everything from a backhoe chopping it to a problem with a card in the central office and even bad weather. The microwave takes out those failure points and provides us with a lot of additional redundancy. It is a very good solution and one (1) of the very first things we purchased. This project has been redesigned eight (8) times now because once we get into it we found out the towers couldn't support the structure. Council President Scott asked if he was correct in thinking that was an $800,000 change for the additional towers. Mr. Croymans responded it was $640,000. The Lakeville tower simply couldn't support the structure and the only option left to us was building a new tower. Council President Scott stated he wants everyone to know that Mr. Croymans inherited that issue from his predecessor. Mr. Croymans responded we dropped the ball because Motorola said we should do a study on the structural load on the towers before the contract was signed. If we would have done that, we would have known Lakeville would have required additional work. We actually had to do work at three (3) other towers to strengthen them. It wasn't as big of a cost as replacing the tower. Council President Scott asked if that came out of the reserve, or part of the budget. Mr. Croymans responded the additional tower is going to come out of the expansion of the $12 million. Vice Committee Chair White asked if there were any other additional costs or needs that have been discovered moving forward besides the cell - tower. Mr. Croymans stated nothing that hasn't already been addressed in our budget. Council President Scott asked if they have a testing period built into the Thanksgiving to December timeline. Mr. Croymans responded besides us building out the infrastructure, we have to reprogram all of the radios. We are still waiting for the state to release the IDs to us, which we hope to have this week. As soon as that happens, all the agencies will be able to go out and reprogram their radios to prepare to cut over to the radio system. The South Bend radio shop will do that for South Bend. Once they have the master template, they can clone them and it takes just a couple minutes per unit. The only issue is we have hundreds of radios. The State has also offered to review the template for safety reasons to confirm that it was built properly. Council President Tim Scott announced that County Council President Raphael Morton is now in attendance.