Communications members to be elected Thursday night

    The E911 Board and the Communications Commission will have a joint meeting at the former library Thursday at 7 p.m. The commission may soon have a few new faces after the mayors of six surrounding towns ? Wellman, Kalona, Riverside, Ainsworth, Crawfordsville and Brighton ? meet at 6:30 p.m. to elect representatives to the commission. Those mayors will elect two representatives and two alternates to serve on the six-member commission. The City of Washington elects two members to the commission and the County Board of Supervisors selects the other two members.  

    The board and the commission will listen to another presentation by consulting engineer Leonard Koehnen from St. Paul, Minn. Koehnen has spoken at the last two joint meetings about the logistics of constructing a new communications center. At the December meeting, Koehnen spoke about the possibility of building a dispatch center adjacent to the county jail at Orchard Hill. He said the advantage of building it adjacent to the jail?s west wall is that the dispatch center would have easy access to fiber optic cables. At the same time, he acknowledged that it would be inconvenient for the public if it were at Orchard Hill.

    The trend in newly constructed dispatch centers is to limit access to the public, Koehnen said at the December meeting. That worried commission Chairman Bob Shepherd, who expressed his desire to make the new dispatch center accessible to walk-ins. He cited the large number of elderly people in Washington County who are accustomed to face-to-face contact as one reason for keeping the dispatch centers open to walk-ins.

For the full story, see our Jan. 20 print edition.