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Council approves Central Square contract for dispatch CAD; implementation to take 18–24 months
Summary
The council approved a contract with Central Square Technologies to replace aging computer-aided dispatch software. Council and staff said the implementation should take 18–24 months; the overall capital project was approved in the 2023 CIP and includes additional hardware costs not in the software contract.
The Waukesha Common Council on June 17 voted to approve a contract with Central Square Technologies for a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system to replace the city’s aging dispatch software.
The contract, approved unanimously, covers the CAD portion of a larger public-safety technology program that also will include a records management system to be considered separately. Staff said the CAD implementation is expected to take 18 to 24 months. The project was included in the city’s 2023 capital improvement plan with a $3 million authorization, and staff told the council they have since secured some federal grant funding toward the overall project.
Tim Fleming, assistant chief for the fire department, Ty Hoffman, assistant chief for the police department, and Duane Bridal, dispatch manager, attended the meeting to describe operational benefits and the selection process. An IT presentation described an extensive vendor evaluation that included on-site demonstrations, scored by subject matter experts from police, fire, IT and GIS. “We were all very optimistic about the future and some of the capabilities that the modern software can give our city versus what we currently have,” an IT representative said of the selection process.
Council members asked about costs and implementation logistics. Staff said the software will be hosted on on-premises servers at City Hall (not a cloud product) and that additional hardware purchases — a new server and related virtualization — are part of the overall project scope but not included in the Central Square contract price. Staff estimated those hardware costs at roughly $200,000–$250,000. The contract also includes pricing protections: no price increase is scheduled for years 1–5, with modest percentage increases thereafter.
The IT Board and the city’s selection committee recommended Central Square after a multi-stage procurement that began in 2022; staff noted one vendor had priced itself out of the final selections and that Central Square offered competitive pricing in the procurement. Council members thanked police, fire, dispatch and IT staff for the multi-year effort to modernize the system.
