March 18, 2009 By News Report
Emergency planning and cooperative agreements paid off yesterday to keep the Reno, Nev., region's emergency 9-1-1 system operating when phone service was disrupted about 12:30 p.m. at the Regional Emergency Communications Center (E-Comm). Following the outage, E-Comm immediately implemented its emergency communications plan to keep the area's 9-1-1 emergency system in operation in cooperation with the Sparks Public Safety Center at the Sparks Police Department.
Reno E-Comm supervisors used personal cell phones to initiate re-routing of the system through AT&T, and to send E-Comm call takers to Sparks to staff phone lines to support re-routing of calls to that system.
As of 1:30 p.m. the E-Comm center was still without telephone service, but 9-1-1 emergency calls were being handled without disruption. Personnel from AT&T were responding to the Reno E-Comm to investigate and correct the problem.
This Digital Communities white paper highlights discussions with IT officials in four counties that have adopted shared services models. Our aim was to learn about the obstacles these governments have faced when it comes to shared services and what it takes to overcome those roadblocks. We also spoke with several members of the IT industry who have thought long and hard about these issues. The paper offers some best practices for shared government-to-government services, but also points out challenges that government and industry still must overcome before this model gains widespread adoption.
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