Washington County Emergency Operations Center and 911 Communications Building construction set to wrap up in April

WASHINGTON - Washington County residents can expect their new emergency operations center and county 911 Communications building to be completed by April with department heads looking to move into the building by late summer.

Cara Sorrells, the dispatch supervisor for the county, said the groundbreaking for the project took place last July and construction picked up right after.

The new center at 2183 Lexington Boulevard will be located between the Washington County Jail and the Washington County Sherriff's Office on Lexington Boulevard. All three buildings will be connected upon completion of the new space.

Currently, operations are done out of the building at 221 West Second Street in Washington, north of the courthouse. The structure is a home built in the 60s where the county sheriff lived until it was later modified to be a jail until it most recently became the communications center, she said.

The current building's basement tends to flood and mold after rain and the HVAC system has trouble keeping up with the heat generated by the amount of equipment in the building, according to a PowerPoint presentation provided by the county.

A new radio system was also needed to adequately provide coverage from the county. The last update was in 2000 and updates should be done every 10-12 years, said Washington County Supervisor Jack Seward.

Because the current building was not built for handling an excess of technology, the electrical outlets could not handle any more devices being plugged in and a need for a new building became dire, he said.

'It's basically a house that's been modified over the years and we have a new radio project going on [so] there was no way we could put new equipment in this outdated building. The electric wasn't what we needed. We also have problems with septic, heating, cooling- it's a house,” Sorrells said, explaining it was difficult to complete work out of a space that was not built for the work being done inside. 'We needed a state of the art hardened building to put the new equipment in.”

Sorrells said due to narrowbanding, there are several places in the county where dispatch cannot get through to officers. Narrowbanding, Seward explained, was put in place by the federal government and decreases the power and effect of the radio signal.

'As they narrowbanded it, they sold those frequencies off to commercial wireless phone (companies),” he said.

The current system operates on 39 percent coverage and the new system will provide 95 percent coverage, Seward said. The county will be able to use the existing towers and purchase two more to add the upgraded radio equipment to.

Seward said representatives from the county went to various church and volunteer groups to explain the need for the new system in preparation for having to vote on a bond for the $3.5 million building and $10.5 million radio upgrade.

'They asked all the basic questions about why (we need this) and as soon as we finished the program they all said, ‘Do it. Even if it costs a little bit of money, it's something we have to have' so our goal then was to provide what we needed that was cost effective. We don't want to spend money (if) we don't have to but we do need to spend money to get what we need,” he said.

The county avoided having to vote for the radios because they were included in an essential service bond and the building in an urban renewal bond.

Carl A. Nelson & Co. is the contractor on the project with Matthew Miller as the project manager. The new building will be able to support four dispatchers instead of the existing two, he said, with the potential to go up to six.

Seward said the new building also will house the Emergency Operations Center (EOC).

Currently the emergency management coordinator has an office in a separate building. When construction is complete both entities will be under one roof which will help create a centralized location in case of emergency and also have all technology in one place, Sorrells said.

'Right now there is no place for that so they thought while we were (building new) lets have a companion project and create this EOC,” she said.

Miller said the new center is set up in a way that when coordinators respond in the event of a disaster, the technological upgrades will be able to support multiple users. The building, a storm hardened structure, also will have a built in repeater system to allow cellphone frequencies to reach.

'That room is built around the mission of responding to emergencies,” he said. 'We've really covered all of the spaces in there (by providing) an emergency operations center, space for the technology and a dispatch center.”

The building will be a hardened structure that will be able to withstand storms and power losses, he said. Should the building lose electricity, batteries will automatically kick in until the generator does so the building does not go without power.

If the building were to lose power, the new system would be accessible by neighboring counties, allowing dispatchers to leave their desks in Washington and move to a new location, Sorrells said.

'If we would go down, Johnson County or Iowa County can be our backup automatically. My dispatchers can pick up and work there like they were working here at the center,” she said.

The new building also will have geothermal heating and cooling. By keeping these units underground, they are safe from storm or tornado damage Miller said.

'Not only is the building itself a storm shelter but all the electrical and mechanical systems are protected as well,” he said.

Building construction is right on track but staff will not be able to work out of the new building until all the radio equipment has been tested, Seward said. In order to ensure the county is receiving the 95 percent coverage it is paying for, testing has to be done when trees are in full foliage.

Sorrells said the goal would be to move staff in late summer or early fall once the coverage is guaranteed.

'Our goal is when the building's ready we can start to put in the new communications equipment, the consoles and the radios. We don't want to move in there prematurely and have to work out of both places, so we are going to do a lot of testing to make sure both places work. When it all works and everything is as it should be, we're going to turn that up and turn this off,” she said.

As for the existing building, no plan has been laid out yet. Seward said the county is looking forward to the completion of the project and having all county emergency services under one roof.

'What we're hoping for right now ... is that what we've done here, the basic backbone of it, will last for 40 years so we're not running into the situation in 10-12 years where we're worried we are one break in the circuit away from the whole thing falling down. It's going to take spending money to do that, but I think it's going to be a good base,” he said.