The Board of Public Safety of Elkhart City approved three Police Department contracts during its July 8 meeting: a $154,530 award for squad‑car upfitting, a purchase of vehicle‑telemetry analytics software from Urban SDK, and a $1,013 diagnostic agreement with Trane to test an HVAC unit.

Chief Dan Melonase, of the Oak Park Police Department, presented the items and described the Urban SDK product as a tool that uses aggregated telematics data from third parties to show vehicle speeds and travel patterns without identifying individual drivers or vehicles. “It doesn’t identify who the driver or the vehicle is,” Melonase said, adding that the company’s analyses can help target enforcement and inform city engineering decisions.

The board voted to award bid number 25‑01 to Auto Obsessions, the lowest bidder that met specifications, with a contract price of $154,530. A subsequent motion to purchase the Urban SDK software also carried. The board then approved a Trane agreement to perform a leak test and diagnostic on a failing HVAC unit, with the diagnostic priced at $1,013.

Melonase said Urban SDK’s data draws on systems already collecting vehicle telematics—OnStar and similar services—and that the company provides processed, aggregated information such as average and median speeds in a chosen segment. “We can actually pull that up, look at what the median speed is in that area, the average speed,” he said. He told the board the city’s legal review had approved the contract.

Board members discussed the utility of the data for faster deployment of officers and for traffic‑planning work by city engineers. Melonase suggested the tool reduces the need to assign staff to manual speed surveys and termed it a “force multiplier” for limited personnel resources.

All three motions passed by voice vote with members saying “Aye.” No dissenting votes were recorded in the meeting minutes.

The motions do not specify ongoing reporting or privacy‑safeguards beyond the chief’s statement that the data set is anonymized and that legal reviewed the purchase. The board did not request additional public reporting during the meeting.