CHENEY – A couple aspects of the city’s Light Department are scheduled to soon function on a remote basis.
At their last meeting in November, the City Council approved two pilot program purchases by the department – one for a new remote metering program and the other for a centralized incident call center program. Both approvals total $18,247, with the metering program the most expensive at $13,497.
According to Light Department Director Steve Marx, the metering program is a six-month agreement with Raleigh, N.C.-based Tantalus Systems, Inc. for their Advanced Metering Infrastructure, or “smart meter” system. The system allows for a variety of remote-managed functions including turning meters on and off, real-time reading of electrical meters every five minutes, ability to also read water meters and integrating with other systems including financial.
“So you’re integrating water, electric and finance for billing,” Marx said.
The system is capable of hooking up to 16 meters on individual data collector lines, with the city opting to purchase 12 meters to begin with in the program. Marx said they looked at two other remote metering systems and selected Tantalus because they were the only one licensed to integrate with the city’s existing Itron system.
“They can integrate what we have existing now, whereas the other systems we’d have to bring in a whole secondary system,” Marx said. “We’d have to maintain Itron at the same time as installing their system.”
The other pilot program approved by council is a 12-month agreement with Daupler, Inc. to redirect outage incident calls from the city’s Police Department to one of three call centers the company operates in the U.S. The call center will be able to monitor single incidents or major outages, dispatch crews to the incident locations and provide updates such as number of homes out, whether or not crews are onsite, how long they’ve been there and projected resolution times.
Daupler provides other features such as onsite crews’ ability to upload photos and provide live-time incident status.
“They kind of have an al a carte service, lots of bells and whistles you can order and of course it costs for each and every one of them,” Marx said. “We’d like to do a shakedown over 12 months, and if it works well we’ll do a full integration.”
Also at the meeting, council approved an additional expenditure of $35,000 on the Safe Routes to School project at Cheney High and Betz Elementary schools. Public Works Director Todd Ableman said the addition money was needed to deal with flooding of a new trail built through Hagelin Park that connects the elementary school with North 8th Street.
The park usually floods in the spring due to the water table being closer to the surface, and in order to deal with this, Ableman said they installed larger rock and more surface grading beneath the new asphalt trail. The additional amount is still within the project’s $635,707 estimated budget — which is mostly funded by a state grant as well as school district funds, with the city acting essentially as project manager.
“It’s still 100 % under construction coverage,” Ableman said. “We just need to get the students back and try it out.”
Council also approved a $64,625 contract with Uniserve Facilities Service Corporation for janitorial services at City Hall, the Utility Building, police station and Wren Pierson Community Center and a $22,515 with Central Square for an electronic timekeeping and scheduling module for the Finance Department’s payroll processing system.
The council also approved the application to add the city’s recently relocated railroad depot to the Local Registry of Historic Places.
John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].
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