County's IT director reports on activities over past month

By Charlene Sims

MOUND CITY – Nearly half of the 1 hour 33 minute Linn County Commission meeting on Monday, Oct. 20, was spent in executive sessions for non-elected personnel, employee performance or trade secrets. Commissioners Jim Johnson and Alison Hamilton were present, Jason Hightower was absent.

During the time the commission was in session, they heard reports from Information Technology (IT) Director Chris Martin and Public Works Administrator Jesse Walton. Weekly reports were also give by Fire Chief Randy Hegwald and AMR representative Virgil Swanson.

Martin’s monthly report listed the following work projects attended to:

• Nearly 1,400 support tickets were opened and 1,353 of those were completed.

• In the last 30 days, nine after-hours emergency callouts were taken care of. Some of those were radio related and a couple of issues were battery backup issues.

• Three new computers were set up.

• Assisted the fair board for arts and crafts to have wifi for vendors. Martin said that had been done for several years. This year IT also provided three radios to the arts and crafts people so that if there was an emergency they could communicate directly to dispatch. No emergency situations occurred.

• Replaced a battery backup at the marina.

• Assisted the district court and the county attorney’s office with a jury trial that was last week, making sure their audio and video was up and going. It was tested before the trial.

• Fixed two door locks in the jail. On one of them a main spring had broken but backups from the county’s stock were used and they were replaced. The other door had a core that had come out of the lock; he was not sure how that happened but it actually ended up bending a piece of metal on the back. Again, this was another easy fix.

• Set up two more virtual private network (VPN) connections at the schools and there are two left to do.

• Corrected a 911 computer aided design (CAD) serial connection issue. Martin said there had been trouble for a while where not all of the 911 data was coming into the county’s CAD system for dispatch. It doesn’t affect their ability to use the CAD or anything like that, it just means that they were manually typing things in which, you know, when a 911 call comes in that’s the last thing they want to do. So IT actually worked with the CAD vendor and the 911 vendor and we got that fixed last week. It worked great over the weekend so Martin said he was confident that’s done.

• Martin said that IT continues to work with La Cygne and the Linn Valley area for putting in those repeaters. The La Cygne repeaters will be put in shortly for them in a temporary fashion until a permanent one can go up on their water tower. He said he was waiting on clearance for Linn Valley’s water tower before that one can be installed. They’re still running some kind of water lines to it and it doesn’t get handed over to the city until that’s complete so we’re just waiting on notification that we can start doing our part after that.

• IT is assisting Kansas Wildlife and Parks with radio setups. They’re buying some radios that work on the county’s system. In the same light, IT is helping the Pleasanton fire department with radios, pricing for radios and also JPS. That’s also the county’s cellphone radio, so we’re working with their fire chief for that.

• Myrick Mechanical is replacing the air conditioning compressor in one of the crack units in the server room.

• Installed two new magnetic locks but they’re in the mechanical areas on the back of the Justice Center.

• Replaced battery backups in central and booking.

“So one thing we’ve been working on, and I’m sort of proud of this one,” Martin told the commissioners. “At the Justice Center they wanted to monitor the generators, there’s two of them on the back of the building.

“They had a problem a couple of months ago where a hose came loose on one of the two, and it leaked oil and the generator wouldn’t start. They got that fixed pretty quick, but they didn’t have a good way to notify remotely if something went wrong with the generator so they talked to the vendor. The vendor gave the a price in the neighborhood of about $5,000 per generator to put the equipment on and there would be monthly fees.

“It seemed a little extreme to me so what we did, I got to looking at it. “We’ve done one, we’re going to be doing the second one. I got to looking at the first one and I found that we can actually basically do some programming and some interfacing ourselves.So what I did, I interfaced directly to the generator and we can now pull every metric. That’s one of our dashboards up there for that generator and we pull that live. We can also record that.

“So by doing that, it helps with fire marshal’s reports. If the fire marshal came back and wanted to know every time we tested the generator or every time it ran, how many hours it ran. Or even if the vendor wanted to know. The memory in the generator only holds for so many events whereas we can hold that information for years if we want to. It gives us just a wealth of information. The neat part that is right now we’re about a hundred bucks. So, versus $10,000 for both generators, we’re at about $100.”

Johnson asked how often it was tested.

Weekly, answered Martin. He said they do some checks on the generator and they have the company come four times a year, especially the big one.

Martin said that besides the jail, that generator also runs have half of the server room. The other one runs the other half of the server room.

Hamilton asked if this monitoring could be done at the health department. She said if they had known that the generator was running at the health department the county could have saved a lot of money when the electricity was turned off.

Martin said for about $100 it could be monitored. He said that notifications of any problems there could be sent to him and Amanda Snyder, director of the health department.

In other business, the commissioners:

• Learned from Walton that a public notice will be put out that the road will be closed for the Baskerville culvert project from Wed. Nov. 12 through the next week and will be closed through the weekend and until the end of the next week. The road will be opened up and the culvert should be set on Nov. 17 and the road should be opened up after that on Wednesday or Thursday.

Walton said that he had checked with the Prairie View school district and that road does not affect them. However, it is going to affect the mail delivery. Some neighbors know that we’re going to start on that date and we will contact the rest of the neighbors.

• Approved a burial permit for Magellan Pipeline out of Oklahoma.

• Heard from Walton that he was figuring out what they need for tires for each shop so the county can go out for bids.

• Learned that salt bids should be in by the first week of November.

• Were informed that the asphalt crew had finished patching on Gireau Road up by Parker. Then they will move down and take care of Tiger Road outside of Pleasanton and get it patched up.

• Heard from Walton that he had reached out to Hi-Tech Interiors about soundproofing project at the Justice Center, they do plan on being here Nov. 22 to start that project.

• Learned that the courthouse roof paperwork has been finalized. Supplies will be delivered this week and they should be starting that roof.

• Learned from Walton that the landfill perimeter berm project starts Nov. 3.

• Learned that the new landfill trucks will come in February.

• Heard from Walton that the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) had reached out to the county about the south half of the 1095 High Risk Rural Road project. He said he is checking with them to see what the county needs to do to get started on that project and if the county is still okay with moving forward on that. Walton said he would bring back more information on this next Monday.