Othello wrangles with communications costs
OTHELLO — The Othello City Council agreed to consider a plan to jointly replace emergency communications equipment with Adams County, allowing the two entities to more closely coordinate and saving the city of Othello a little money in the process.
According to Othello Police Chief Phil Schenck, the current control console used in the police dispatch office is 10 years old. Motorola, which services the equipment, said that spare parts for the console are hard to find, and has had to go hunting on E-bay for spares for its own equipment, Schenck added.
Schenck told the council that Motorola has proposed a plan to Adams County to replace both the city and the county’s communications consoles, with both entities paying for the deal over the course of five years.
The arrangement would cost around $626,000, with Othello’s portion at just over $273,000. The deal would cost Othello roughly $90,000 a year — including maintenance and replacement — from 2019 to 2023.
“There’s a replacement plan built into this,” Schenck said of the proposed deal. “Adams County will carry Othello the first year (2018), and it would integrate us with county dispatching.”
Adams County Emergency Management Director Jay Wiese said the county’s dispatch equipment “is beginning to fail” and it would be good to keep the two entities emergency communications tightly connected.
“If we don’t do this together, we will lose that connectivity,” Wiese said.
The deal would also allow Othello to handle Adams County dispatch, and vice versa, in the event a problem shuts one of them down.
While Othello would bear no costs for the replacement in 2018, city council members have already approved a very tight budget, and were concerned that future costs would make things even worse.
“This makes things tighter,” said council member John Lallas. “This will be a big chunk of change.”
“These costs are going to have to happen,” Schenck said. “If we wait, it will cost more. The savings in this is about $70,000.”
Schenck and Wiese agreed to finalize the deal with Motorola and give the city council firm contract numbers in March.
The Othello police chief also told the city council that Adams County would like to a hire a probation officer and split the roughly $100,000 per-year cost with the city.
“We pay 50 percent up to $50,000. But they’ve not hired anyone yet,” Schenck said.
The goal of having a probation officer for the Othello area would be to help former jail inmates follow their release conditions and ensure proper oversight, which should help reduce crime, Schenck said.
Adams County has proposed this because its court costs are rising, and as the largest city, Othello contributes the lion’s share of those who go through the county court and jail system. Adams County may, at some point, look for other ways for Othello to bear more of its share of the costs of criminal justice, Schenck added.
“Since our discussions with the county, there have been a substantial increase in court costs,” said Mayor Shawn Logan.
However, city council members again were concerned with new requests for spending following the enactment of a budget that took weeks of wrangling to bring into balance.
“We need to look at where the funding is coming from … again,” Lallas said. “The budget is very tight, and we struggled to get what we wanted. Unless we’re making more money somehow.”
The city council made no decisions about the county proposal to jointly hire a probation officer.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.
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