Costly city of Chicago 911 center remodeling a 'waste'

Daley administration spends $480,000 on consoles soon to be scrapped

Would you hire a contractor to modify a wall unit in your den to accommodate a bigger-screen TV, knowing you were just months away from refurnishing?

That's essentially what happened at Chicago's 911 emergency center -- at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Daley administration spent $480,000 to modify 911 center consoles to accommodate 17-inch monitors instead of the current 15-inch models, even though the consoles themselves were about to be replaced, a source said.

Jim Argiropoulos, deputy executive director of the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, gave AT&T the go-ahead to modify the 107 dispatcher and call taker consoles. At about the same time, OEMC was issuing a request for proposals to furniture vendors interested in ripping them out.

The RFP was issued in late 2008. Negotiations with an unidentified vendor began in March. The work is expected to be finished this summer.

AT&T began modifying the consoles in January and completed the job in February. The new 17-inch monitors have yet to be installed.

"Why waste $480,000 on a modification of something you know you're gonna replace in a few months anyway? And if the 17-inch monitors are so important, why wouldn't you put them in right away?" said a source familiar with the project.

"The bottom line is that all of this modification effort that took two months to do was for nothing. It was a waste of $480,000."

OEMC spokesperson Jennifer Martinez insisted that the fix cost $3,600 per console or $386,000.

She defended the decision to modify consoles scheduled to be replaced.

"We're still in negotiations [with the furniture contactor]. It could be up to a year before we see new work stations," Martinez said.

"In the meantime, we do not want to risk public safety. It's critical to public safety to have the latest technology on the 911 floor. We want to equip our call takers and dispatchers with the most up-to-date equipment possible. It's the balance between that and finances" that the city is attempting to strike.

Since 1995, dispatchers and call takers who field 911 calls have used 15-inch monitors that were the largest available when the $217 million center opened at Madison and Loomis. Seventeen-inch monitors "can show more information, " said a source familiar with the change.