DeKalb County ratifies emergency purchase for NextGen 911 upgrade after presentation on new features and staffing gains

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 for disaster relocation, a three-year retention approach for records, and plans to expand server storage to hold incoming multimedia evidence.

Swain briefed the committee on staffing and retention steps taken since she arrived in the department about a year ago. She said the department increased starting pay for communications staff to $46,800 (about $22.50 per hour) and implemented raises and morale programs; Swain said communications-officer positions are filled, and the department's overall headcount increased over the past year. "We started at 54% and ended at 64% (service level) from January through December 2024," she said, describing measured improvement after hiring and process changes.

Committee members asked about technical and operational details. Commissioner Shakira Johnson praised the staffing and retention work; Commissioner Marita Davis Johnson asked whether callers must enable GPS location on their phones; Swain said GPS location must be enabled for the system to obtain the phone’s location. Commissioners also asked whether neighboring jurisdictions — including Atlanta and Cobb County — have ESInet; Swain said Atlanta and Cobb do, and that the Georgia Emergency Communications Authority is working on statewide ESInet capability.

The committee then considered item 2020023, described in the agenda as the five‑year agreement with AT&T Enterprises LLC for the E911 call-handling system, including Apex add-on features from Carbine Ltd. The item seeks ratification of an emergency, sole-source purchase with a reported maximum amount of $8,128,791.04 and authorization for the CEO or her designee to execute necessary documents. The committee voted to approve the item by voice vote. The record in the meeting transcript shows the motion and a verbal "All in favor? Motion passes," but individual roll-call tallies were not specified on the record.

Swain and other speakers cautioned that some contractual paperwork is still in audit review; committee members discussed deferring formal action until audit concludes but also expressed that the purchase was critical and time-sensitive. A committee member moved to approve the item "depending on the audit approval," and the motion was seconded and approved.

Why it matters: The upgrade moves DeKalb County toward a NextGen 911 architecture that can carry multimedia and higher‑precision location data, which officials said should reduce misrouting, speed emergency response and create redundancy during major incidents. The purchase is a multi‑million‑dollar, sole‑source emergency procurement that the committee ratified and that county staff say will be fully functional on switchover.

Further details and next steps: County staff said they will finalize outstanding audit and contract paperwork and that system features (multimedia, language translation, responder links, and nonemergency queuing) will be available at switchover. The county is also acquiring additional storage and servers to hold multimedia received by 911. Swain said the county will discuss retention parameters and open-records access for images and video, noting a planned three-year retention standard used by the department.