Clark County's Communication System Upgrade Almost Complete
Monday, October 1st, 2018 -- 1:28 PM
-John Ross, Clark County’s Emergency Management Director, recently provided the Clark County Board of Supervisors an update on the progress of the county’s communication upgrade project.John explained how the project initially began.
“When I arrived in Clark County in October of 2012, a study had just recently been completed regarding communications needs here for public safety in the county. We worked through that study, found that we had several unanswered questions, weren’t able to work through that report to get the questions answered, so a sub-committee was formed to look at what we need to do. That sub-committee recommended doing a new study to address the issues that we identified. We then did that. That study recommended replacement of the 911 answering equipment here at the courthouse in the sheriff’s office, as well as an upgrade to the public safety communications system infrastructure that serves Clark County through law enforcement, EMS, fire, highway department and emergency management.”
After going before the Clark County Board several times and asking for the funding, the project was underway. And, after a handful of years, Jon said the project is pretty much done.
“We are wrapping up the project as it stands today. The new system for the 911 answering equipment actually went online here at the courthouse in the sheriff’s office dispatch center in April of 2016 and has been in service since then. The radio portion of the infrastructure upgrade took a little longer than thought or planned, due to some unexpected hurdles we encountered with acquiring tower space for the equipment. That new system for the radio side of things went online and live for users starting with the highway department the last week in May of this year. And then on June 5th, we cut over the public safety users over to the new system and cut the dispatch center over to the new system for the radio communications.”
Jon said they hope to wrap up the last bits of the project within the next few weeks.
“We’re hoping to have it completely wrapped in the next few weeks. What’s left to do is final site inspections, some minor punch list items that need to be done, some site restoration, some work that doesn’t effect the operation of the system as it’s been put into service, but just, for lack of a better word, puts a bow on it and finishes it out, at which point then we pay the final invoices that we have with our vendors and contractors and then the project is officially, officially done. But as far as the users are concerned, they’ve been on the area since, like I said, highway since the last week of May and the other users since June 5th. They’ve been operating without any known issues that I’m aware, so for them they won’t notice, it’s behind the scenes work. It’s just my part to finish everything up and make sure everything is completely wrapped up.”
Jon ended our interview by explaining why this project needed to be done, besides the obvious reason of safety.
“We had equipment that was nearing and past its end of manufacturer support. So, being able to repair equipment in the event of failure was going to become very difficult. We had identified issues with coverage on the radio system for the end users that we needed to address. When we looked at what would go into the new system, we wanted to look at coverage, we wanted to look at capacity for the users, we wanted to look at complexity of operations and we, also, were very mindful of cost. We wanted to get the most appropriate and best system that we could while being mindful of the financial impact. Through the use of our consultants and through very effectively written specifications and bidding and proposal documents, I think we were very effective in doing that. But we had identified gaps in the old system based on age and status of equipment support and the coverage issues that we had been made aware of and we had experienced, that we had to do something to bring the system up-to-date and address some of those issues.”
And although the County Board was sure the project would end up at least 20% over budget, Jon is happy to report that it looks like the project will be coming in under budget.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.