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