The city shut down briefly last Thursday while PG&E crews removed and replaced an old transformer that provides power to the police department, Veterans Hall, City Hall, the fire station, 801 Magnolia, and the Piedmont Park tot lot bathroom. The project marked the latest milestone in the new 911 Dispatch Center project, and the city said it was completed a day sooner than expected.
“While this is a much more ‘behind the scenes’ capital project than the pool, it’s certainly no less important in terms of impact on Piedmont residents,” the city said in an email on Tuesday. “Dispatch serves as the beating heart of Piedmont’s public safety response, fielding 13,000 calls a year for police and fire services.”
The new dispatch center means new state-of-the-art call answering equipment that will help dispatchers better geolocate calls from cell phones and offers real-time, on-screen translation capability, the city said. It will also allow the dispatchers to continuously monitor Piedmont’s public safety cameras and ALPRs, rather than switching back and forth between windows on their workstation monitors.
Next up for the Dispatch project will be building out the police department’s new IT room – installing racks, servers, cabling, then configuring all the new networking and telecommunications infrastructure. Once that’s complete, installing, testing, and training on the next-generation dispatch workstations takes place, all in preparation for a phased transition from the temporary dispatch center to the new facility later this year.