County approves Net Standard setup and maintenance for fire district MDTs

The Miami County Board of County Commissioners approved a contract with Net Standard to connect 11 mobile data terminals (MDTs) installed in fire-district vehicles to the sheriff's computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, including a $5,500 one-time setup fee and a three-year maintenance agreement at $1,500 per month.

County staff said the fire district's per-device cost under the proposed contract would be about $136.36 per month, slightly lower than the per-device cost under the sheriff's existing Net Standard contract. Commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the setup and maintenance contract.

A staff presenter identified as Mark described the proposed fees and compared them with an existing county contract the sheriff's office has with Net Standard. That contract, Mark said, began April 1 and totals $144,977.25 for an 11-month period, which averages $13,179.75 per month and covered 89 licenses across MDTs, iPads and desktop computers. That breaks down to about $148.08 per device per month under the sheriff's contract; the fire district's proposed $1,500 monthly fee for 11 devices equates to about $136.36 per device per month.

Mark also told commissioners that Sheriff Kelly had warned the county that if Miami County tried to piggyback additional devices onto the sheriff's 89-license agreement, the per-license price would increase because of the larger device count. He said Net Standard confirmed that a third-party vendor would still need to work with Net Standard to connect to the sheriff's servers, and that Net Standard's hourly rate for that work would be $150 per hour.

"We've installed over about $100,000 worth of computers and geared to mount them in the trucks right now. So this is the last step to get them operational," Mark said during the presentation.

Commissioner Bond moved to approve the contract as presented; Commissioner Vaughn seconded. Commissioner Bond and other commissioners questioned the recurring cost but ultimately voted to proceed.

County staff said budget review showed available funds to cover the remainder of the current year and to accommodate the maintenance fees in next year's budget. The agreement approved at the meeting covers only the setup and maintenance described; any additional future hardware or license changes could affect cost per device.

The commission did not discuss alternative vendors in detail beyond staff's note that any other IT vendor would still need to coordinate with Net Standard and could incur the vendor-hourly fee cited by Net Standard.