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Council approves $516,227.73 purchase to complete Vesta 9-1-1 call-handling system
Summary
The council approved $516,227.73 in additional components for the Motorola Vesta 9-1-1 system to add caller location mapping, backup workstations, geo-redundancy and a text translation service supporting 57 languages; the city share after a 50/50 split with the county is $258,113.86.
The Fort Wayne Common Council on Nov. 4 approved an ordinance authorizing the purchase of additional components needed to complete implementation of the Motorola Vesta 9-1-1 call-handling system. The total cost is $516,227.73, with the cityshare after a 50/50 split with Allen County listed as $258,113.86.
Susan Rary, interim director for the Consolidated Communications Partnership, said the original purchase lacked essential features identified during implementation, including caller location mapping, adequate backup center workstations and geo-redundancy to ensure reliability if a primary line fails. Rary said the purchase also includes a text-translation service "supporting 57 languages," which will help the CCP continue to communicate with non-English-speaking callers or texters if vendor language lines are unavailable.
Council members asked whether the vendor language line had previously gone down; Rary confirmed there have been outages that prevented transfers to the language line. The CCP board has approved the additional components, and the council recorded a 9-0 do-pass recommendation in committee and 9-0 passage in the regular session.
The ordinance specifies the purchase is to finalize and fully implement the Vesta system so the CCP can continue delivering services to residents and first responders.
