Council to Meet to Vote on $1.5 million Expenditure for Public Safety Software

Meeting Notice

The Common Council will meet Tuesday, immediately following the adjournment of the regularly scheduled Community Meeting schedule for 7PM at Macdonough School in the Spring Street Gym to discuss and vote on two ordinances to spend a total of $1.5 million on a new public safety hardware and software system.

COMMENTARY

If the irony wasn't so pitiful, it might be laughable.  At the only the third of its regularly scheduled Community Meetings, the Common Council has decided to subvert the intent of those meetings, and seize the opportunity to vote on a controversial purchase of new software and hardware for the Police Department.


The meeting will be held, again ironically, at the exact same time as an essential Board of Education meeting about redistricting that will consider the fate of the school population at Macdonough, where the Council is coincidentally meeting.

If you feel like something is being crammed down your throat, you have good reason.


The expenditure of money for new (and apparently needed) software and hardware comes just four years after an identical system was approved and purchased by the same folks recommending this one.  By most reports, that system is an utter failure, but citizens would hardly know that since the details of the failed system, and most of the details on the new system have been held out of earshot in executive sessions which were called to protect public security, but were used, instead, to discuss competitive bidding.  The latter is not covered by the Freedom of Information act, and those discussions were illegal.


The meeting Tuesday will also be largely, out of earshot.  The Common Council held a workshop last week but essential details were missing.  The meeting tonight will be held in a room where public cablecast of the show is unlikely (though it would be possible if the city thought it was important enough to utilize easy-to-use broadband webcast capability through the wifi at the school).


What's the rush?


The Police Department needs the system, of this there is no doubt.  And the Common Council needs to vote on the ordinance tonight, and once more at another scheduled meeting (that will be Thursday), to make the purchase legal.


Council member David Bauer raised an interesting objection to the purchase noting that while both pieces of the system being purchased seem to be essential to the proper functioning of the other, they are strangely being purchased separately.  One part of the system will not function without the other, but we're buying both separately.  The systems are integrated, but we're buying them separately.


Separately, the purchase are below the $750,000 threshold which require a public referendum on the purchase.  Separately, the Council can vote to approve the purchases.  If they were purchase together, you and I would get to vote on it.

I don't begrudge the PD every tool they need to do a good job.  I've depended on their prompt and efficient work myself.  And since this purchase is so essential, I feel the Council ought to schedule the purchase of the entire system as a single purchase and schedule if for a referendum as soon as possible.

I'd vote for it, wouldn't you?