City officials seek emergency HVAC repairs at Bishop Street communication center to protect 9-1-1 servers

City officials on Monday presented a resolution to award a $124,843 contract to McCluskey Mechanical Contractors for emergency repairs and replacement of the HVAC system at the Bishop Street Communication Center, which city staff said currently houses servers that run the city’s 9-1-1, telephone and network systems.

The repairs were described as urgent because staff said the current system was old and had recently failed when temperatures spiked. “If we lose the servers, we lose everything. We lose communications, we lose the network and telephones, even 9-1-1 goes down,” a city staff member said during the caucus meeting.

The resolution to fund the work was presented as agenda item 10-34; staff said funds are available in the listed account. City staff told the council the Bishop Street building will remain in public use after the new Public Safety Building is fully built out, and as long as the city retains the property it must maintain operational systems there.

Several council members questioned why the city is spending on the older building while a new Public Safety Building exists. Staff said migration of all servers and systems to the new facility is not complete and that a full migration is custom-designed and will take, at minimum, about a year to finish.

City staff also said temporary portable cooling units had been used in recent weeks during extreme heat but that the permanent HVAC repairs were needed to avoid recurring outages. At the caucus the resolution was introduced for council consideration; no formal roll-call vote was recorded in the caucus discussion.

The item was presented to the council for consideration and will appear on the council agenda for formal action.