County updates dispatch, hopes to improve services

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — County officials are spending almost $1 million to make life a little safer for county residents as well as to improve county services.

Some $460,000 of these funds are being used to bring Metro Dispatch more up to date and give local law enforcement officers better and quicker updates when they call in to the dispatch center for information.

The system is now being put in, and County Sheriff Frank Gonzales said everything seems to be working out well. “We’ve had a few glitches but no major problems,” he said.
Hilda Bowman, director of Metro Dispatch, agreed, saying that when the system had to be done for switch-overs, it was done during quiet times when there wasn’t too much going on. And when this occurred, the system would be down for only about five minutes.

The new system, she said, has new features.

For example, when a police officer calls in for information about any warrants, dispatchers will be able to send them a photo of the person who is wanted to help them in determining if that is the right person.

Dispatchers are now going through training on the system but once that is done, they have to go through training again since the department plans to upgrade early next year to the 8.1 software from the 7.0 that the dispatchers are now being trained on.

The decision was made to do it this way, she said, because it’s easier to start off with the 7.0 version and then learn the changes for the advanced version rather than just start out at the higher version.

But Metro workers won’t be the only one that are going through training.

The McKinley County government is also installing a new computer system in the next few weeks, and any county employee who works with computers is now taking training on the new system.

“We actually began our training in August,” County Manager Tom Trujillo said.

The county has been talking about upgrading its computer system for the past couple of years but needed to set aside $500,000 or so in this year’s budget to actually be able to get it.

Like the system at Metro, the county system will provide a lot more information to county employees. It will also, in some instances, save the county money.

For example, the county purchasing office will be able with the new system to track, for example, how many paper towels the county uses in a month. If it is a sufficient number to warrant a bulk purchase once a year, the computer will be able to tell county officials that and the county would be able to put out a purchase order to buy in bulk, thus saving the county some money, Trujillo said.