2006 NS Contract - Authorization to Purchase WebEOC Utilizing Existing Grant Funds

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ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS ACTION AGENDA ITEM ABSTRACT Meeting Date: October 3, 2006 Action Agenda Item No. 5- I SUBJECT: Authorization to Purchase WebEOC Utilizing Existing Grant Funds DEPARTMENT: Emergency Management/ PUBLIC HEARING: (Y/N) No Purchasing ATTACHMENT(S): INFORMATION CONTACT: 9/19/06 Emergency Management Jack Ball, 919-968-2050 Director Memorandum Pam Jones, 919-245-2650 Quote from ESI PURPOSE: To authorize the purchase of an incident management computer software package, called WebEOC, utilizing grant funding and other funds. BACKGROUND: The North Carolina Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, Division of Emergency Management, notified Orange County Emergency Management in late March 2006 of their decision to no longer utilize EM2000 software for disaster management. The State instead switched to a different product called WebEOC. The State provided only one access point to utilize the system, making it ineffective to utilize during local response to emergencies. In other words, Orange County has the capability to interact with the State and with other counties who have this software, but the information cannot currently be transmitted from Orange County to local emergency response agencies such as municipal police and fire, volunteer fire departments and rescue squads, or the University's public safety department. Orange County Emergency Management immediately began to explore funding opportunities to implement WebEOC on a local level to better engage the County's partners. Emergency Management was notified in August 2006 that it may utilize a portion of the previously received 2004 State Homeland Security funding to fund the program. Emergency Management identified $45,000 available to direct to the WebEOC project. The County's Chief Information Officer, in collaboration with Emergency Management, Purchasing, Budget and the Manager's Office is exploring how this software may most effectively be deployed. Options under review include having the software on in-house servers or having the software with a remote provider, called an ASP (application service provider) service. Preliminary cost analysis has indicated that the ASP option may be more prudent in that it can provide the redundancy needed, will ensure sufficient personnel are available to keep the service up to date, be geographically distant from any Orange County local disaster area and in the final analysis will be of comparable cost. An annual maintenance cost from the software vendor will be approximately $18,000 if the software is installed on an ASP server, which would compare favorably with the costs that the County would expect to incur if the application were installed on in-house servers.