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911 director urges funding for dispatch continuity, monitoring and questions $50k dark-fiber cost
Summary
911/dispatch director described a continuity kit, expanded vendor monitoring and rising maintenance costs for critical systems; he also flagged roughly $50,000 annual dark‑fiber connectivity costs between county sites that he urged the county to renegotiate.
DeKalb County’s 911/dispatch director outlined technology and continuity needs at the July 10 council meeting, asking for funding for expanded managed services and for a portable continuity kit that would allow dispatch operations to run from an alternate site during an outage.
The director described a Mevo kit: a transportable case including six phones, a cradle point and other components so dispatchers could answer 911 and administrative lines and operate radios if the primary center were offline. The county is also moving toward 24/7 vendor monitoring for its Spillman dispatch system and other mission‑critical services; the vendor monitoring is intended to detect failures and trigger fixes before local staff encounter outages.
Separately, the director flagged a recurring cost for an unused dark‑fiber link between county facilities. He said the county has been paying roughly $50,000 annually for a dark‑fiber connection that was contracted as “excess resources” from a city provider at the time of installation; that cost has compounded over multiple years and warrants renegotiation, he said.
Council members asked about non‑emergency phone routing and whether callers to municipal lobby numbers are directed to central dispatch after hours; the director confirmed residential and municipal lobby lines do ring into central dispatch during nonbusiness hours.
Council thanked the director for outlining continuity steps and asked staff to explore options to renegotiate the fiber contract and to identify how vendor monitoring costs will be charged and funded in 2026.
