Finance Committee — 09/15/2021 Page 7
unique the dialect may be, and those are extremely costly. The benefit of this is once we sign the contract, we
are under no obligation to use it moving forward. Meaning if six months from now we can't use it, then there's
no more service charges. We can end the contract or it can just sit in limbo until we have the funding for it.
Alderman Klee
May | follow up?
Mayor Donchess
Yes.
Alderman Klee
| appreciate that. That actually makes me feel a little bit better. But | know that hospitals use certain types of
interpretations and so on. | mean do they have people that they call up that work there or do we know how
they do it versus what this is going to be? | don't know what the cost of their programming is either but | guess
I'm asking more of this has all the bells and whistles and it's wonderful. And | think it's really worthwhile and as
my colleagues have pointed out, it's important. | live in a very diverse Ward where sometimes it is very difficult
to communicate with people that | don't speak that language. So for you to have something like this, | know it's
going to make your job easier because you're going to be in my Ward and so on. So | do appreciate that.
I'm just have a little bit of anxiety of this unfunded where's the money going to come from this $32,000? | know
you said we don't need to worry about it but we do because at the end of the year are you going to come back
and say is ended up costing us $32,000. And not that $32,000 in the grand scheme of things is it worth every
penny of it? | don't mean that. I'm just saying is that we have to come up with the money at some point.
Jim Testaverde, Deputy Police Chief
Mr. Mayor may |?
Mayor Donchess
Yeah.
Jim Testaverde, Deputy Police Chief
Alderwoman | don't disagree with what you're saying but let's take it into what we're currently doing today.
Alderman Klee
Okay.
Jim Testaverde, Deputy Police Chief
Right now today if you said well what would you do because this is happening on a daily basis, we would have
to either use emergency 911 if it was for an emergency or if it was for a more in depth investigation, we are
going to subcontract a company and that usually can take depending on the issue a couple of days and we
muddle through and at times we've used family members in an emergency situation just so we can take control
of the situation and that any investigator, it's kind of common sense, it is not an ideal situation to use a family
member or loved one to interpret. We understand that and we avoid it at all costs. That's currently what would
happen. We would use one of our officers or employees. We would call the other agencies. Ve would call
the Manchester. We'd call down to a more diverse agency like Boston and we can do that but these are very
time consuming. So if we didn't do this, | understand when you talk about the unfunding, but right now we
have an obligation to do it regardless. So then plan of the Captain of the Detective Bureau that did all the
research on this was until we understand what the standing is with the grant, we will scrutinize this as much as
possible. We're not going to turn people away, of course, but we're going to use this for the most dire need.
Hoping to get the grant, then we can use it hopefully, you know, three times the amount and really surpass this
number.
Alderman Klee
Thank you. Just one more follow up.
