The Cape Girardeau County Commission approved an intergovernmental cooperation agreement with the City of Jackson for the consolidated dispatch center planned to be at the Cape Girardeau Sheriff’s Office.
Commissioner Charlie Herbst said the target date for completion of the project is Jan. 1, 2020.
Both the County Commission and the Jackson Board of Aldermen approved moving forward with the project in November 2017 with this new agreement saying capital costs related to dispatch services will be split 50/50 between the two government entities.
The County currently has three dispatch centers, with the Sheriff’s Office, Jackson Police Department and Cape Girardeau Police Department each having one. The dispatch center in the City of Cape Girardeau currently serves the same population as the dispatch centers at the Sheriff’s Office and the Jackson Police Department combined.
The project came about in an effort to more efficiently provide 911 services for the two smaller government entities.
In other action:
• The collector’s office plans on switching to Tyler Technologies software to stay up-to-date with the assessor’s office. The assessor’s office recently switched to using Vanguard software for personal property assessments and is planning on switching the real estate assessments this year. The new program for the collector’s office will be able to communicate with the assessor’s office software.
The total cost of the new software is $170,000, with the assessor’s office providing $25,000 toward the purchase. Part of the cost covers the conversion of the data from the previously used software.
The funds will come out of the capital improvement fund, and the fund will be reimbursed with money that would have been spent to maintain the current software in the future.
• The County approved a change order of $210,700 to Penzel Construction for the new County Courthouse project.
The additional costs were due to drilled piers needing to be drilled deeper than expected. Commissioner Paul Koeper said it is difficult to estimate how deep the piers will need to go until the process has started.
Corrected: A previously published version of this article misidentified the new software the collector’s office plans on obtaining. The software is Tyler Technologies’ Incode 10 Program. We regret this error.
