The 911 Call Center servicing Jefferson City and Cole County will be updating its systems in the coming months.
The Jefferson City Council unanimously approved Monday night a $430,238 contract with Intrado Life and Safety Solutions Corp for the 911 call answering service.
Since all Cole County agencies use the same 911 center, the Cole County Commission approved the move last week and agreed to pay 25 percent of the cost.
Jefferson City will be responsible for $331,239 out of the initial cost.
Staff plans to use funds saved due to vacant positions along with Capital Improvement Sales Tax funding for communications equipment and general police funds to pay for the first year.
Yearly maintenance is expected to cost between $24,512 and $26,668. The contract is for five years, but allows for two additional one-year renewals for a total of seven years.
The call center currently uses the Solacom system.
JCPD Lt. Chad Stieferman said the department has issues with the program's customer service and has open maintenance requests from two years ago.
"We have had some technical and service issues with Soracom over the past several years," he said.
While switching company means changing hardware, Stieferman said it's about time to do that with the Solacom hardware, which has been used for six years. The contract expires in November.
Because the council approved the purchase Monday night, Stieferman said, the order should be placed this week and installed by the beginning of November to avoid any lapse in coverage.
A hardware refresh with Solacom would cost around $120,000 along with with software subscription renewals, he said.
In addition, Stieferman said, changing to Intrado would allow the Cole County call center to work better with others in the region that use the same system.
Boone County, Gasconade County and Moniteau County use Intrado, he said.
Boone County is the emergency backup for Cole County 911, which means if one center's system goes down, the other helps filter calls.
If both are on Intrado, an operator in Boone County could come to Jefferson City and access what they need for Boone County calls.
"Anytime we have an outage, or overflow calls, they all go to Boone County and Boone County's come to ours," Stieferman said. "By getting on the same software and hardware platform that Boone County uses, it exponentially increases our ability for inner connectivity between our (911 centers). That makes it a lot easier for us to transfer calls back and forth between each other."