Officials up spending on 911 call center

The Lorain County commissioners put a cap on how much they’re willing to spend on a new 911 call center and renovations to a current call center during a Feb. 21 meeting.

In a meeting last week, the commissioners approved up to $2.5 million in bonds to renovate and upgrade the systems in the new call center on Burns Road in Elyria.

This week, the commissioners amended the legislation to put a cap of $3.5 million on the spending and put a time frame of 20 years on the bonds.

County Administrator James Cordes said the recent issues with the county’s 911 services going down over the weekend of Feb. 16 illustrated the need for the county to have the most upto-date equipment.

“Given our recent situation with 911, I think we need to more aggressively move with this other equipment that’s old and get it replaced,” Cordes said.

The initial plan was to just install the latest equipment at the new Burns Road facility first, then slowly update the current main call center which will be used as a backup once the new facility is opened, he said.

“I’m going to run it concurrent as much as possible,” Cordes said.

The renovation of the new call center is on track and the intention is to build redundancies into the system so that if an issue does arise, it does not have a catastrophic effect, he said.

Cordes also gave an update on the recent 911 outage, saying the system is about 100 percent back up and running.

“This is probably the worst incident that I’ve seen at 911,” he said. “We’ve had problems before, but not this big.”

In her report, Commissioner Lori Kokoski commented on pictures on the internet of the colored lights that were seen on the Old County Courthouse.

Cordes expressed displeasure that they were lit when the work has not been completed on the future home of the Lorain County Adult Probation Department, saying an electrician working on the building left them on overnight so that a supervisor could drive by and see how it looks.

“I was pretty upset, because we really wanted just to have that as part of when the grounds are done and everything’s proper,” he said. ”But, you can see

that it’s going to provide an amazing tribute in downtown Elyria, along with law enforcement, first responder, fire memorial that’s going to be amazingly lit too.

“This is what our archival cities need. Lorain, Elyria, they need these kind of things because it improves the downtown. I wanted us to be a part of that so we can assist the cities in getting rebuilt downtown.”

Cordes also reaffirmed his hope the state would approve funding for a $260,000 project to install colored LED lighting to the Charles Berry Bascule Bridge in Lorain.