Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
DeKalb County ratifies emergency purchase for NextGen 911 upgrade after presentation on new features and staffing gains
Summary
DeKalb County’s E911 director briefed the Employee Relations & Public Safety Committee on a NextGen 911 system upgrade — including location accuracy, multimedia call handling and redundancy — and the committee moved to ratify the emergency purchase of the system, a contract the county reports will not exceed $8,128,791.04.
Corina Swain, E911 communications director for DeKalb County, told the Employee Relations & Public Safety Committee that the county is finalizing a NextGen 911 upgrade and expects the system to go live before July 1, 2025.
Swain said the purchase includes an ESInet (emergency services Internet) and a call-handling platform called Apex from Carbine, which together will allow dispatchers to receive text messages, pictures and video as well as more precise caller location information — including elevation and apartment-level location — and automatic language translation and transcription on screen for dispatchers. "We are able to tell someone's location within feet," Swain said, describing the system's GPS-based accuracy and built-in redundancy with a 99.999% availability target.
The system is intended to let dispatchers reroute nonemergency calls into a separate queue, send multimedia links to responding officers, and share call traffic with neighboring ESINets to offload calls during major incidents. Swain also described portable laptop access…
Already have an account? Log in
Subscribe to keep reading
Unlock the rest of this article — and every article on Citizen Portal.
- Unlimited articles
- AI-powered breakdowns of topics, speakers, decisions, and budgets
- Instant alerts when your location has a new meeting
- Follow topics and more locations
- 1,000 AI Insights / month, plus AI Chat
