SE MN Radio Advisory Committee (RAC) Meeting Minutes Thursday, September 22, 2011 11:00 a.m. (Immediately following the SEMNGTF meeting) Olmsted County Government Center Conference Room 1, Rochester, MN 1) Meeting was called to order by SEMNRAC Chair Darnell at 11:01 a.m. In Attendance: RAC Members: Jim Jensen/Dodge County Daryl Jensen/Fillmore County Doug Ely/Houston County Scott Yeiter/Houston County Mark May/Mower County Dave Mueller/Olmsted County Mark Darnell/Olmsted County Barb Brewington/Rice/Steele County Rodney Bartsh/Wabasha County Brenda Wodele/Wabasha County Dave Brand/Winona County Others in Attendance: Barbara Brommer/Wabasha County Rick Freshwater/Olmsted County Joe Rau/Dodge County Steve Borchardt/RIC Shari Schmitz/Motorola Neale Caflisch/ANCOM Paul Bostrack/Winona PD Sid Sanoctci/ANCOM Tim Lee/MNDOT Andy Terry/SEH 2) Approval of Agenda Item IV, Election of Chair and Vice Chair, needs to be removed. This was done at last meeting. Motion by Bartsh/Jim Jensen to remove Item IV from agenda. 3) Approval of RAC meeting minutes from July 21, 2011 meeting ** I believe this should have been to approve RAC meeting minutes from August 18, 2011 meeting ** Motion by Bartsh/Daryl Jensen to approve RAC minutes from July 21, 2011 (August 18, 2011) meeting. 4) Removed per above motion under #2 5) Open Issues a) Goodhue County Progress Update Not in attendance. b) Freeborn County Progress Update Rick Freshwater All subscribers programmed. Have all APEX radios. Intend to go live October 3 rd. Today Rick will be programming the Albert Lea EMS talk group in the Mayo Clinic ECC because Mayo Gold Cross ECC will be dispatching for Albert Lea EMS so will doing directly on ARMER system. Rick sat in on the On Target Dispatch training and it was very good. They did a great job explaining the MCC7500 s.
d) Wabasha County Progress Update Sheriff Rodney Bartsh Working on Firefighter s grant to make the purchase. Lake City is the authorized financial holder of funds. Supposed to make motion next week to make the purchase. Anticipate going live in December 2011. Still doing some training. Darnell had questioned about a communication problem regarding a medical call in the very NE part of the County (Whitewater River Valley). Bartsh indicated it was a combination of a couple issues; being short a radio, user error, and training. e) Winona County Progress Update Sheriff Dave Brand Mike Peterson has been programming the radios and doing training with the Dispatchers. There was a meeting to get the Garvin Heights Tower site up. They will be breaking ground next Monday. Expecting tower shipment mid October. Will go live once tower up. Target live date is the end of this year. Rick Freshwater indicated that he and Mike Peterson picked up the STR yesterday, 30 radios, from DECN so they are now in Winona County. The Users group is working on a standard. Rick also commented that whoever put them together in their cases was done very professional. f) Houston County Progress Update Chief Deputy Scott Yeiter This morning pushed cutover date back 2 weeks to October 31, 2011. Having issues with installation and microwave. Not getting installed in time to properly train Dispatchers. Having User group meetings every 2 weeks in the County with good attendance. Working on getting all the installation done for the Fire Departments and Police Departments. Highway went live the end of July; no issues. All User training done. Thanked Olmsted County for Rick Freshwater s services on programming the 500 radios in July. All radios have been handed out; Fire Department and Public Works. Caledonia went live about 2 weeks ago. Fire Department has been using them on the HO zones testing where they work or don t work. They are extremely happy with the coverage that they are getting. g) Fillmore County Progress Update Sheriff Daryl Jensen A bit behind. Map handout shows 3 Towers that are not live. 2 Towers are live. Believe there is land acquisition on another so may have 3 rd tower going up soon and hoping to have 4 th one up by next summer. Was rejected on last year s AFG grant. Will be sending in new application tomorrow. Prepared for limited participation but if get the grant may be allow to do full participation for sometime late next year. h) Steele County Progress Update Sheriff Thiele Man down button works. Pushed accidentally. Chad Forstick: Hosted Part I Train the Trainer on August 24 th and 25 th with 14 attendees. Working on setting up training dates for Part II. Chief Deputy Yeiter suggested to focus on what radios are programmed to do not what they can do. c) Rice County Progress Update Sheriff Dunn Same as last meeting. Still having tower issues with missing the township. They were ready to close the purchase agreement and then the City of Dundas? said have to change plans and offsets to building and have to change what building looks like because it s in the future of their annexation. Looking at possibly the 3 rd quarter of 2012.
i) Dodge County Progress Update Sheriff Jim Jensen Up and running since May. A few issues. Latest issue with the Mantorville Fire Department coverage right in Mantorville at the bottom of the hill. The law enforcement portables would work but the Fire Department portables would not. Found out there were settings in the program that were not in the Fire Department radios. They have now been changed and reprogrammed. Highway Department s have been installed and they received training last week. j) Interoperability Update Borchardt At the SW and SC User Committee last week they expressed frustration in the lack of expertise to create talk group plans, past practices, planning process. Developed a workshop concept which was conducted in the SW this past Monday and Tuesday with 3-4 people from each County. Also, brought in Tom Justin to help. In the morning did a theory presentation on what other counties have done and in the afternoon put the county s planning groups together with their plan that they have to date and provided them with consultation as they had more discussion. Same was done on Tuesday with Marshall with the North counties. Benefit of standardization across the region will occur from these workshops. Arranging SC the 2 nd week and anticipate N on Monday and S on Tuesday. Wanted to bring up in case some SE counties may be interested as these workshops have been very successful. Regional Plan logging The SW is sponsoring regional approach to logging. All but one or two counties have committed to participating (NICE program); SC had presentations by both NICE and Verint and are pursuing configuration proposals to see how they would do something on a regional basis. SE, about 1 ½ years ago, had a couple presentations by vendors but have no sense of regional strategy since that point. This is something separate from the consolidation study as the consolidation study is 5 to 10 years vs. this being a year down the road and suggested may want to look at regional strategy options. Rick Freshwater added that Goodhue County purchased a product that upgrades the NICE logging so can have playback. This is a new product that NICE is putting together for this purpose. There were instant playback problems previously but has been resolved with this new product. Have NICE loggers up and running so the infrastructure is basically there just tying to the network. Cost factors and maintenance will stay the same but if split out between agencies it will extremely reduce the cost for the maintenance. Would suggest we pursue. Will have to also eventually address LEAD upgrade for the MCC7500 s because that plays in with NICE logging. Would also need to look at the connectivity and cross benefit of that connectivity. SW and SC is able to share a regional logging cost effectively is because they agreed to use a VPN connection. The connectivity or access to audio logging is constrained by the VPN connection. Digital phone & trunk talk groups discussed by Andy. Barb Brewington from Steele/Rice has NICE loggers and they are looking for partnerships. Problem capturing everything; will be going to new phone system in January 2012. Hospital Organizations Working with Brooke Wojek (sp?); she has an interest in coordinating the efforts of hospitals in major multi hospital events. Interested in consistency in how hospital Emergency Department radios are programmed and which talk groups they have, what kind of training the hospital personnel has, and can all push talks throughout operation be part of the system or just emergency activities traffic that interfaces with local public safety? Should they come in as separate discipline such as Gold Cross, North Memorial, etc.? They are coming in as one participation plan for the whole company because they are multi-county in nature. Hospitals are unique enough in their discipline that they should ban together and come in with their own participation plan through the Department of Health, get their own ID s, get their own talk groups assigned, and have their own System Administrator or should they come in through the County and respect existing structure but then seek to create this kind of consistency through other means such as a regional standard created at the RRB level that
dictates what talk groups would be in each hospital radio and appoint a rotating System Administrator? Consistency is the major component and wanted to bring to RAC for awareness. Also, keep in mind system loading and channel capacity. This topic is also under discussion at the OTC level. Lengthy discussion held. Houston County questioned Control Stations status; good to go. Working on setting up meetings to get other cluster Counties. Hoping to have more answers in October as to what the border counties will be getting. k) Operations & Technical Committee update Rick Freshwater Rick was unable to attend OTC meeting. m) State Update Tim Lee Map handout discussed. Minimal amount of VHF criteria given was the design of the out of state area mobile level coverage for VHF across the state sites ended up with putting MNCEF station tied to CCGW; once tied to a CCGW (Conventional Channel Gateway) it is available to any 7500 counsel within the zone. Interface to get conventional equipment to a 7500 counsel. Shared stations. Will be paralleled over and connected to BIMS at the MSO so also available at Gold Elite counsels. Olmsted & Dodge only have Gold Elite counsels. Also parallel over into a moto bridge network. Radio variety that can control all these stations need a lift station unit (?) to access it or there is software that you could load on to any PC and then tunnel in and access it. It s going to all three and it is shared between all those sites. Working on installing them. Converted the old Patrol stations, the old TAC channel to MNCEF and connected them to the CCGW s and took a number of their stations when transitioned over and tied them in. They are only tied to the CCGW at this time, just starting to put the bridging equipment in to tie them to the Gold Elite and Moto Bridge. In process of building Moto Bridge network. Also putting a VHF mobile radio basically as a control station at the same sites as the Moto Bridge that s tied just to Moto Bridge. The VHF control station can be programmed with anything. Moto Bridge is an on the fly separate position that you can take resources quickly and tie them together instead of using counsel patches. Great product. Approximate cost for software is $2,000 and $50,000 for terminal. ECN has hired Federal Engineering since started building it to look into the operational procedural side for the VHF overlay. Would like 2 representatives from each region to be part of the group to start planning. l) Grant Update/Finance Update See handout. Judy went home sick. Will report on final figures for the 2008 IECGP and 2008 HSEM grants at the RRB meeting. Rick Freshwater discussed power purchase for bi-directional amplifier going into Dover/Eyota High School which will greatly enhance coverage as they currently have no coverage. Brought some equipment with today. To be completed by fall. This is one of the last schools that had no coverage. n) HSEM Update Brenda Wodele gave update. Thought hospitals purchased radios. SE Region EM finished state gap analysis. They have also been working on critical infrastructure and resources to get updated. The region has purchased a mobile ID system. Cash of APEX radios just recently purchased. Video Conferencing systems in each county are available. Freshwater: APEX radios were used during Presidential Detail by Fillmore County. The APEX radios are available with EM authorization. They are dual band and have every VHF resource in the region.
o) Radio Users Group Update Joe Rau Made a motion at their meeting to recommend changing regional channel name from SE911 to SECall. Will follow same date 12/31/2012. Yeiter: Very close to SEEOC call; confusing. Freshwater: Will make it consistent throughout the region. SECall is not on every radio, it is on EM radios. Noticed on talk group request form it is already requesting SECall. Concerned that requests are happening before it gets through the process. The RRB has not even voted on certain issues yet. Rau: A motion was made at the group to continue the joint evening meetings. However, there is a problem with low attendance. Discussed forwarding attendance structure on to RAC as an accountability tool. Also discussed designating a primary and secondary from each group from each county as members. New Chair and Vice Chair were voted in. Chair and Vice Chair of both groups is Mike Peterson/Winona County. Ideas were discussed how to improve attendance. Darnell indicated that the RRB previously approved Owners & Operators (routine Dispatch people that would normally be considered Owners & Operators) to pay OT for them to attend the night meetings. Will double check motion and send out. Discussed asking RAC to pursue regional logging. October meeting was moved to the 27 th to avoid MEA weekend. Communications exercise was also moved to October 27 th. p) Training Update Matt Maas not in attendance. Darnell presented. Everything going as planned. Sessions have been going very well and well attended. Most are on Part II. Freshwater: Dispatch training was very good. New Business a) Andy Terry A revised/expanded MCMT ARMER plan is proposed, but we would like to proceed with addition of radios while that planning effort is in process. Representing Mayo Clinic Medical Transport. Refer to letter request in handout dated September 15, 2011. Contracted to do an assessment for Mayo Clinic s operation statewide and participation on the system. The plan was presented to their management team. Their management team felt the participation plan should be modified and updated so Mayo Clinic Campus can be incorporated into their participation on the ARMER system. Andy has not been contracted to do that work yet so wanted to present an interim plan due to timing constraints and such. Currently, Mayo Clinic and Gold Cross have radios on the ARMER system but they don t have any contract with MNDOT and they don t officially have ID s issued to them for their use. This interim plan was presented to the OTC and approved. This plan incorporates over 500 radios across the state and about 50 talk groups for Mayo Clinic statewide. Each region has different capacities and concerns about system loading so Andy will come to each region to talk about system loading and the impact that Mayo may have on each region. Mayo Clinic is requesting 178 radios with the recognition that the plan will be modified and come back with a revised plan talking about comm center connectivity and counsel upgrades and logging. Just addressing radio loading today. In Rochester they have about 124 radios and Owatonna they have about 25 radios and Austin has about 17 radios and then a couple in the central office. Request is for 178 radios and distributed throughout the region so they are not concentrated in totally one county. Mayo Clinic in the heaviest loaded area with 178 radios in a 5 channel ASR site is about a 7% system load. They do not anticipate adding any channel resources to the system. Asking for approval today for channel loading only; interim request. 7% includes full operation. Darnell: If approved, will still need to go to RRB for final approval.
Motion by Thiele/Daryl Jensen to approve channel loading of 178 radios for Mayo Clinic Medical Transportation according to the interim MCMT ARMER plan. This motion is recommended to move forward to the RRB for final approval. b) Al Fjerstad PSAP Manager/EM Director Talk group request (See attached) Darnell presented. Request from Mille Lacs County Sheriff s Office to add SE call through SE 12 talk groups to radios needed for interoperability. Discussion held. There are a total of 14 talk groups. RRB took a strong stand to critique each request. Motion by Daryl Jensen/Jim Jensen to approve Mille Lacs County Sheriff s Office request to add SE call through SE 12 talk groups. Motion is recommended to move forward to the RRB for final approval. Other: Darnell did not get vendor fair underway as had previously planned due to time constraints. Tate radio has not responded at all. There was a motion at the last meeting to have a vendor fair, do we still want? Vendor fair is held at the Interop Conference in April. No interest to set up a separate one. 1) Adjournment Motion by Thiele/Ely to adjourn. Meeting adjourned at 12:25 hrs. Next scheduled RRB meeting is October 3, 2011 at 12:30 PM at Rochester Public Utilities Next scheduled RAC meetings are October 20, 2011 at 12:00 PM at Rochester Public Utilities In addition to emailed documents, handouts included: Authorization to Use Talk Groups Not Owned by the Requesting Agency (Mille Lacs County SO) FEMA Allowable Costs Matrix SEH letter request dated September 15, 2011 Grants Update for September 23, 2011 Minutes Respectfully Submitted by Barbara Brommer SEMNRRB Website: http://semnrrb.com/