Des Plaines eager for new citywide alert system

Des Plaines residents may soon be able to receive text messages about a burglary spree in their neighborhood, e-mails on where to pick up sandbags during flooding, or just informational alerts.

These are just some of the perks of a high-tech mass notification system city officials plan to purchase with some unexpected income.

Des Plaines suddenly has a more than $107,000 windfall from wireless 911 surcharge fees that all wireless customers pay monthly to the state.

A number of suburban towns and agencies that handle wireless 911 calls got extra money from the state in December because wireless carriers failed to claim $13.3 million collected in a special fund to reimburse those providers for service upgrades.

Money had been accumulating in the fund since 2000, said Carl Pound, Illinois Commerce Commission spokesman who administers the wireless surcharge funds.

Since the money may only be used to improve emergency communications, the state awarded it to 911 dispatch centers that already receive roughly 58 cents of every 73 cents in wireless surcharge fees paid monthly per customer. Most centers received three times their usual monthly revenue.

"It was quite a surprise," said Sherrill Ornberg, director of the Des Plaines-based North Suburban Emergency Communications Center based in Des Plaines.

The North Suburban center also dispatches to Morton Grove, Niles and Park Ridge, but the mass notification system is being bought for Des Plaines only.

Des Plaines will use its share to purchase the state-of-the-art, Internet-based alert system, which was cut from this year's budget.

"It's awesome news for the citizens because this additional money gave us the opportunity to give them a quality mass notification system," Ornberg said.

The new system will cost the city more than $30,000 yearly. The city council is expected to select a California vendor, National Notification Network (also called "3n") on Monday, March 2.

Des Plaines and the Northwest Central Dispatch System would be among the first in Illinois to get the alert system.

Northwest Central Dispatch serves Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, Elk Grove Village, Hoffman Estates, Mount Prospect, Palatine, Palatine Rural Fire, Prospect Heights Police, Schaumburg and Streamwood.

DuComm dispatch, which serves much of DuPage County, also may follow suit because the three dispatch centers jointly negotiated the price. Together the centers serve 29 towns that must individually approve the deal.

"That's the whole reason they are giving us such an advantageous price because they want a presence in Illinois," Ornberg said. "This is a substantial footprint."

Ornberg said Des Plaines' current system, which can only relay messages via a land telephone line, is antiquated and has failed numerous times in the past.

Des Plaines currently has 14 telephone lines at its 1420 Miner St. 911 dispatch center that it uses for smaller notifications. To disseminate information on a larger scale, the city uses an off-site posting center in Tennessee.

"When we tried to use it for the severe weather in 2007 and the flooding situation in 2008, it performed very poorly," she said. "It took us hours and hours, and starts and stops, which should never have happened, to get out the notifications on where sandbags were going to be and where street closures were."

Ornberg said the primary benefit of the new system, based in California with two backup sites in Canada, is that it can be activated remotely from a laptop computer, PDA or cell phone with Internet access. It can also target notification to specific neighborhoods.

She anticipates the new system would be activated frequently to send alerts even of a non-catastrophic nature, such as hydrant flushing, boil orders, public works picking up fallen tree branches after a storm, and informing residents of missing persons.

"You need to have it there when there's a catastrophe, but by and large this is a great value to the citizens just to give them general information," Ornberg said.

Residents with only a land telephone line would not have to sign up, as their information is already in the city's database. Other residents could register their e-mail addresses, pagers, faxes, cell phones or Voice Over Internet Protocol numbers online to get alerts.

If approved by the council, it would take roughly 45 days to train employees and get the system online, Ornberg said.