(Spirit Lake)– The Dickinson County Board of Supervisors today (Tues.) heard a proposal to upgrade the county’s 911 communications center.
Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Ehret says some of the equipment in the center is nearing its life expectancy…
“We’ve been in there 13 and-a-half years, since 2006 when that phase of the courthouse was built, so everything in there is starting to get a little age on it and we want to look at replacing the furniture and at the same time upgrade the radio console which also is 13 and-a-half years-old and is no longer going to be serviced after about 2026 roughly. So we need to look at replacing that along with the furniture like I mentioned, and while we’re at it we’re going to do some other work in there to kind of spruce the place up a bit so we’re looking at doing that hopefully fiscal year ’22 and all of that has a rough price tag of about $485,000.”
Funding for that project will also be taken into consideration during upcoming budget talks.
Ehret says the possibility of the county converting to a statewide compatible system for its radios and communications is also out there for future consideration…
“That’s a pretty big if right now. It’s got a pretty big price tag, potentially up to three and-a-half million to four million dollars. That’s probably in the five to 10 year range right now. A lot of discussion has to take place amongst all of our users, all of our fire, EMS, all the cities, to see if that’s the route we want to take and if we decide to then we’ll start to head down that road, but.”
Ehret says any transition to a new system, if the decision is made to do that, probably wouldn’t happen until sometime between the 2025 and 2030 fiscal years.
