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Sheriff warns county phone outages are dropping admin calls; commissioners consider emergency replacement
Summary
The sheriff told commissioners county administrative lines have been failing about half the time for 10 days, dropping some life‑safety-related calls. Commissioners discussed emergency procurement and switching to cloud SIP trunks or other alternate routes to restore reliable service.
Adams County officials described intermittent failures of administrative phone lines lasting about 10 days, a problem the sheriff called an emergency because some medical or alarm calls have dropped and did not dispatch responders.
The sheriff (Speaker 8) told the board, "Someone's fallen, someone's passed out, and they call us and it just drops," and said the 911 emergency lines themselves remained functional. The sheriff said the county's admin lines are operating at roughly 50% successful calls in recent tests and expressed frustration at lack of timely response from the phone vendor.
County staff said they plan to pursue replacement of the phone system. Speaker 5 said the long-term fix will be a new phone strategy replacing local SIP trunks with cloud-based SIP trunks and potentially routing through alternate providers. Commissioners discussed whether emergency procurement procedures could accelerate fixes and considered an emergency action to get Allstar Communications or other vendors working on a solution.
Staff also mentioned BrightSpeed bringing fiber into a local building, which might provide an alternate route; the sheriff and other staff discussed satellite or dedicated emergency circuits as contingency options.
Provenance: Sheriff's comments on phone outages and follow-up discussion are in the transcript around SEG 1636–SEG 1740 and earlier operational mentions at SEG 695–SEG 706.
