Finance Committee - 10/18/2017 Page 23
Mr. Mansfield
It is an existing structure that is on the opposite side of where the terminals are, again for hopefully the thought
of if something happened there.
Alderman Siegel
Is there any way to have this structure in place closer to Nashua?
Mr. Mansfield
For the cost, probably no. That’s the reason why we went down this path, because of the cost. We don’t want
to rent property and we don’t want to rent facilities. We don’t want to have to maintain a building. We had
thought about different things.
Alderman Clemons
It takes 15 minutes to get to the airport. If you have sirens it is going to be even quicker.
Alderman Caron
As | am reading this, it is $300,000 from Nashua and Manchester, but this is a grant. What set you on this path
along with the Manchester communications person to apply for this grant, the Homeland Security
Communication Disaster? | understand the inner-communications, but | think what this is about is a major
disaster happening within either city between fire and police and that’s what we are looking at. Doing grants is
very complicated and time consuming, so I’d like to Know why you would pursue this if it’s maybe not worth the
time and effort.
Mr. Mansfield
As | stated early on, we were looking at ways to provide redundancy to our police, fire, dispatch system in
Manchester and Nashua. This was the most cost effective way to do this. It also provides us with not only
redundancy in both our dispatch centers, it also provides us with interoperability capabilities as well. Especially
if we have a joint operation going on, this facility could be utilized for that joint operation as well where you
have Manchester and Nashua city dispatchers sitting next to each other. The room is big enough. You could
also have command staff in there to be directing on what’s happening. And the benefit for us going to the
airport is again, as | said, cost. It is more of a central location. It would be more central if it was in Merrimack.
| Know that; I’m aware of that, but again, it’s not that far from the City of Nashua. We can hit our towers from
the location that we’re at. It’s not that big of a deal.
When we looked at the redundancy, we are in communication with Manchester because everything that we
were going to do with this redundancy had to involve both of us together. We sat down coming up with ideas
of if we can’t do what we want to do because it’s not cost effective, especially for Manchester, and they
wouldn't be able to get the funding to do what they need to do, what’s the next solution? Again, it’s still going
to provide us with redundancy in our dispatch center, but also provide us with the capability of more
interoperable and working close togheter in major incidents and disasters. That's how this whole thing came
about.
MOTION CARRIED
UNFINISHED BUSINESS — None
