BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ) – The clock is ticking for Brown County to find a permanent solution for their 911 dispatch system.
The county pulled the plug on a new $1.2 million error-filled system in early February, deciding to go back to the previous system, which becomes obsolete in around 18 months.
That may seem like ample time, but for those taxed with the responsibility of finding a functional, long-term option, it’s more of a sprint than a marathon.
“It’s pretty limited time,” says Cullen Peltier, Brown County Director of Public Safety Communications. “We have to have a firm decision on what we’re going to do in the next month or so.”
The reason that a decision needs to come so soon is that it takes over a year to get a new system in place and ready to go.
For Peltier and his staff, it’ll be a nerve-racking experience to take the plunge on another new system so quickly after a previous one faltered.
“I do feel that we learned some valuable things, but again there’s always hesitation,” he explains.
He adds that the thought process behind the previous system being selected was solid, but that the performance simply wasn’t what they signed up for.
That means this go-around his staff will be better equipped to detect possible red flags when searching for a permanent solution.
“We look at what we did well, what we did wrong, what we can do to improve on our next implementation and move forward from there,” says Peltier.
For the time being the old, “band-aid,” system will remain in place, which is more reliable than the system that got pulled, but still far from perfect.
“It can be slow at times, it can get bogged down at times,” he says. “There are some features in the newer system that we had that aren’t at our disposal anymore.”
Nonetheless, the shift back to the older system has been met with open-arms from agencies across the county that had been growing increasingly frustrated.
“It’s absolutely a familiarity thing, as always,” explains Peltier. “They know what they had, it’s the devil you know sort of thing.”
