OEM Proposes Tech Advances to Boro Hall

Chatham Borough is looking to make $61,000 in technological advancements to the council chambers at the Chatham Borough Municipal Building to make it the Office of Emergency Management’s emergency operating center.

Steve Williams, deputy coordinator of the Chatham OEM, argued the OEM’s case for including the technology in the 2013 municipal budget during Monday’s council meeting.

Williams said the proposed upgrades would allow all departments to gather and manage information “in real time.” It would also allow anybody to monitor the police and fire mobile feeds from the Morris County Communication Center, update and maintain maps of power outages and street closures and look at up to two screens at once.

About $45,000 of the projected cost will go toward purchasing the display, which will include a monitor and cart, controller unit and a digital enhancement. Williams said he is currently looking to get that price lowered.

The remaining $16,000 will include $6,500 to add additional electrical outlets and circuits, as well as run wires from the police department’s network to the council chambers; $5,000 for smart technology to enhance maps and maintain displayed documents; and $4,500 for two laptop computers.

Williams said making the technological upgrades – improving efficiency as a result – will be cost-effective for the borough, allowing for the saving of $1.02 per household per year over 20 years.

Councilman Jim Lonergan said that the financial committee had tried to figure out whether the improvements were a “must-have” or a “nice-to-have” when the idea was first presented.

“Our general conclusion was that it was a need coming out of [Hurricane] Sandy where we were lacking,” Lonergan said.

He said the other major need – improving communications to residents – has already been resolved and that these technological improvements would put all of the information in one place. Councilman Gerald Helfrich added that the advancements would make communications more meaningful.

Mayor Bruce Harris said that, having gone through Tropical Storm Irene and Hurricane Sandy, he realized “how much we are on our own” during a storm. Although the county and state OEMs assisted, he said neither had specific information about what was going on in Chatham Borough.

“The information we were able to supply took a lot of manual labor to get,” Harris said. “Having this kind of system will really help us improve our emergency management.”