June 25, 2012 -- Remodeling the Fremont Police Station to house a joint Fremont/Dodge County emergency dispatch center is ready to go to bids, and the center could be operational by next spring.

The city council on Tuesday will consider a resolution seeking bids on the estimated remodel.

The council will meet at 7 p.m. on the second floor of the Municipal Building, preceded by a 6:45 p.m. study session.

The resolution is listed under the "consent agenda" portion of the meeting. Consent agenda items may be moved to the regular agenda at the request of any member of the council or the public.

"We’ll actually approve the bids at the last meeting in July with anticipated work to begin in early August," Mayor Scott Getzschman said.

The city-county public safety answering point committee met Friday morning, Getzschman said, and estimated no more than 60 days construction to prepare the space for occupying.

"During the construction time we will start the process of picking out equipment and getting it ordered," he added.

"The goal still would be that we would have a director hired sometime in the September-October timeframe, and we would have equipment ordered. Our hope would be that it could be operational in the March 2013 time frame," Getzschman said.

Per an inter-local agreement approved by the county on April 4 and the city council on April 10, the city and county will evenly share startup and equipment costs, as well as funding for future equipment. Operational expenses will be split 65 percent to the city and 35 percent to the county.

The city and county each passed a resolution in November 2011 to locate the public safety answering point at the police station.

The resolution also established "a shared vision" of a joint law enforcement center in which the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office and Fremont Police Department would be co-located together.

Posted by Veronica Silva Cusi, news correspondent
Source: http://fremonttribune.com/article_b34a797e-bed6-11e1-9f6b-0019bb2963f4.html