Franklin County put much of its nearly $6 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds toward public safety, from cruisers to security systems to the local jail. One of its larger expenditures was a new countywide emergency communications system.
This makes Franklin County one of at least ten counties in Maine that put ARPA funds toward communications upgrades for law enforcement and emergency response teams.
While Franklin County went with Information Management Corporation (IMC) for its new system, a number of other counties use a different company, Spillman.
Maine’s dozens of agencies are split between these two communications software providers, and as The Maine Monitor previously reported, these different computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems don’t necessarily communicate with one another, complicating inter-agency emergency response.
Since 2012, Franklin County has used a program developed by IMC in the 1990s to manage dispatch, information sharing and record keeping services for emergency response throughout the county. The system allows dispatchers, police, firefighters and others to submit, locate and swap critical data and communicate during anything from a traffic stop to a structure fire.
Prior to 2012, Franklin County’s departments used a patchwork of programs that ranged from IMC to systems built by private individuals who had retired. The current system that unified the county’s record keeping was largely funded through a Department of Homeland Security interoperability emergency communications grant in 2011.
In 2022, the heads of public safety departments notified county commissioners that the current IMC product, now more than 30 years old, would no longer be receiving software upgrades. Franklin County has since signed a contract with IMC to build a new system called CentralSquare Pro, after that system was priced at less than half the cost of another proposal.
According to Franklin County Emergency Management Agency Director Amanda Simoneau, CentralSquare Pro will be paid for with $460,000 in ARPA funds, a $113,000 DHS grant and another $116,000 in money garnered by the Unorganized Territory’s tax increment financing district associated with the Kibby Mountain wind project. Finally, town fire and police departments that use the system have agreed to contribute $91,000.
Simoneau said that the fact that the new system will be managed by the same company will make it easier to migrate the data. CentralSquare Pro also has a module that will allow Franklin County Jail personnel to access and transmit data using the same unified system, rather than through the separate module they use now.
Farmington Police Chief Kenneth Charles said that he was excited to get an upgrade to the computer-aided dispatch system. The new product should make it easier to file crash reports, something that Charles said the current IMC system can struggle with.
One improvement that CentralSquare Pro won’t include is an ability to talk to CAD systems supported by Spillman. Products supported by Spillman are used at the state level and by a number of agencies and counties, including Oxford County.
This means that if a resident of Oxford County moves to Franklin County, there is no CAD-supported way for agencies to transfer or look up information, such as prior interactions with law enforcement.
Instead, Charles said that if officers do realize there’s a connection they may need to call their counterparts in the other agency or use some other system, such as the National Crime Information Center’s database.
The lack of interoperability between CAD systems is a nationally recognized problem, Charles said, but he wasn’t aware of any statewide effort to bridge the systems.
Franklin County stuck with IMC in part for the same reason the company was chosen back in 2012: cost. The new IMC product was contracted at a little more than $700,000 while an alternative CAD system supported by Spillman came in at $1.8 million.
CentralSquare Pro will also take advantage of another ARPA-supported initiative: an ortho-imaging project that county commissioners approved back in 2022.
Ortho-imaging is an advanced form of aerial photography that removes distortions caused by the terrain and tilting of the camera. As a result, orthoimages have a uniform scale and can be superimposed directly on top of maps.
Franklin County used roughly $40,000 in ARPA funds to leverage another $80,000 in state money to get imaging of the county. Simoneau noted that some of the towns had wanted more detailed imaging for tax assessment purposes.
Beyond tax assessment maps and forestry purposes, the county is interested in ortho-imaging as a way of augmenting the geographical information they have access to when responding to an emergency call.
In some cases, Simoneau noted, a call might come in and when dispatchers zoomed in for more detail, they might only see an old map, or one with incomplete information. The ortho-imaging will provide detailed imagery of the terrain throughout the county.
The new CentralSquare Pro system will be able to access the county’s new ortho-imaging when it launches later this year. Officials said the system is being finalized and training is expected to run through the summer, and the full switch is expected by early next year.
