By Annette Newcomb~Editor
During Monday night’s meeting Twin Lakes Village Trustees learned the entire phone system at the Twin Lakes Police Department basically “fried” on Friday afternoon.
According to Village Administrator Jennifer Pollitt, the phone system just finally died. Thanks to some fast thinking by police department staff, Frontier was asked to divert 911 calls to cell phones used by Water Patrol.
Twin Lakes’ 911 calls go through the County Joint Services and they transfer calls to the TLPD Dispatch Center.
A temporary system offering two phones with four lines each was set up to handle the calls for the short term. Dispatch has phone service but the rest of the department will be without hard lines until the new system is installed.
During Monday’s village board meeting the board learned the CPU Board and Phone System just gave up the ghost without warning and the manufacturer went out of business 10 years ago.
Eric Schultz of Cyvon Inc., of Gurnee, Ill., has been the contracted Internet Technician for the police station for the past four years and was at Monday night’s meeting.
Ironically his company’s annual contract was up for renewal for another year, at a cost of $3,912, which the board approved Monday night.
Schultz presented a plan to bring the phone systems in the TLPD, village hall, sewer, and public works up to date through the use of Internet phone service. Combining this with reliable paging solutions can add an extra layer to these communications so that all bases are covered in the event that something like this has the potential to happen again, but if they go for an internet phone service, they may have better luck and that clearly was on the minds of those at the meeting.
Monday night he proposed to bring in a T-1 line to the TLPD from Frontier, which would offer 11 channels, and up to 30 different extension numbers, allowing more direct, private lines.
The system is expected to last 20 years and includes phones and hardware. The board approved the phone system not to exceed $23,000, which includes a 5 percent contingency. It was noted that almost $21,000 of the invoiced amount covers the cost of equipment. The labor accounts for about $1,300 of the entire bill.
The village has $95,000 in its contingency fund and the funds will be paid out of that account.
Schultz said once the equipment is in, the phone service for village hall will be shut down for about an hour.
“That is a scheduled shut down and you will know ahead of time. We try to do it after hours so your business is not affected,” he said.