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Council approves $90,000/year Doppler contract for after‑hours dispatch, outage mapping and customer texts
Summary
The council approved a five‑year contract with Doppler for incident response and supplemental dispatch services at about $90,000 annually plus a $30,000 implementation fee and 5% annual increases; staff said the system will provide outage maps, text alerts, heat maps and daytime spillover call handling to improve customer communications during storms and outages.
The council approved a five‑year contract to procure Doppler incident‑response and supplemental dispatch services to improve customer communications for utility outages and after‑hours calls.
Utility General Manager Jeff Shanahan described the package—about $90,000 annually, a $30,000 implementation fee, and a 5% annual increase—that will provide after‑hours call handling, outage‑text signups, heat‑map outage visualizations, and an optional AMI‑metering interface for a public outage map. Shanahan said the tool would reduce the burden on the utility control room during major storms (citing up to 23,000 customers briefly out of power in a recent event) and enable customers who opt in to receive targeted text updates. Council members praised the proposal and approved the resolution 6–0.
