To hire or not to hire? The question was raised several months ago at a county board meeting regarding whether a person should be hired to handle upcoming changes and upgrades to communication towers in Cook County. The county is in the process of aligning its system with the state’s new Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response (ARMER) that will facilitate communication among public law enforcement and emergency response agencies.
An ad hoc tower committee decided the need would be shortterm and what needs to be done can be done by people already in place. Cook County Personnel Director Janet Simonen surveyed other counties and found that most counties did not have a position solely dedicated to communication towers and upgrades.
Rey Freeman of GeoComm, a consulting company with a specialty in public safety communications that has been contracted to help Cook County navigate its upgrade to the ARMER system, concurred. Those responsibilities are more commonly assigned to someone in the sheriff ’s department, he said.
Minutes from that ad hoc committee meeting state, “All agreed that the county was at a critical point regarding communications issues. Issues and work will peak due to the ARMER tower build-out and transitions and then possibly level out.
“Following continued discussion, Falk stated that he would be willing to be the ‘point person’ for the county for the moment. [Radio Systems Coordinator Duane] Ege thought that the county could ‘buy some time’ of at least a few months if a threeperson team consisting of County Sheriff Mark Falk (public safety issues), County Attorney Tim Scannell (administrative/ legal/contractor issues) and himself as communications contractor (technical issues) was established to address the current pressing issues regarding communications and towers. Danna MacKenzie was asked if she could commit some I.T. [information technology] support, and she agreed to assign one of her employees to work with the group on a short-term basis on a very modest level.
“Consensus of the group was to designate Falk as the temporary communications ‘point person’ for the county and have him form a work team consisting of himself, Scannell, Ege, and an I.T. representative to address pressing communication/tower issues.”
Sheriff Falk verified the decisions outlined in the ad hoc committee meeting minutes quoted above.
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