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Linn County IT director says low-cost generator and alarm monitoring cuts potential vendor costs
Summary
IT Director Chris Martin reported new in‑house monitoring for generators and fire alarms that he said will provide real‑time alerts, long-term logs and large cost savings compared with vendor systems; he also gave an operations update on tickets, radios and phone issues.
Chris Martin, Linn County IT director, told commissioners on Oct. 20 that his office has built in‑house monitoring for county generators and the Justice Center fire alarm that he said provides real‑time alerts and long-term logs at a small fraction of vendor prices.
Martin said the county’s vendor quoted roughly $5,000 per generator plus ongoing fees, but his team interfaced directly with one generator and “we can actually do some, basically, some programming and some interfacing ourselves,” producing a dashboard and alerting for delivery of roughly $100 in parts. “So by doing that, it helps with fire marshal reports,” Martin said. He added the system records runtime, alarms and other metrics to preserve a longer history than the generator’s internal memory.
The IT director said the Justice Center has two generators; one is a Generac and one is a Cummins, and the Generac is already monitored. He described weekly test procedures and said alerts are routed to himself, the sheriff and the jailer so problems are flagged immediately rather than discovered after failure.
Martin also said his office used the same single‑board computer approach to monitor the building fire alarm for about $25 compared with an outside monitoring device estimated at $3,500. He said the county now retains alarm logs electronically and can provide them for inspections or maintenance records.
Other items Martin reported: year‑to‑date the IT help desk had 1,368 open support tickets and closed 1,353; nine after‑hours emergency callouts in the past 30 days (some radio and battery backup issues); three new computers installed; assistance setting up Wi‑Fi and radios for the county fair arts and crafts/vendor area; replacement battery backups at the marina and central booking; two magnetic locks installed in mechanical areas at the Justice Center to reduce key handling; correction of a partial 911 to CAD data feed problem after vendor coordination; and progress on radio repeaters for Linn Valley and LaCene areas.
Martin described ongoing phone issues related to FirstNet/AT&T interoperability with numbers ported from Verizon and said a vendor was testing a fix; if the vendor did not provide a solution promptly he said he planned to replace the phones. He closed by announcing the annual veterans light show Nov. 7–11 and said veterans’ submissions are on the county website.
Commissioners asked whether the health‑department generator could be monitored the same way; Martin said he would evaluate it and expected similar low costs if the unit supports Modbus output. No formal vote or formal directive was recorded in the transcript.
Martin’s presentation and the commissioners’ follow-up focused on operational reliability for the jail and server systems and on small, low‑cost automation projects intended to reduce vendor fees and provide longer‑term logs for inspections.
