Delays and glitches in a new McLean County Computer Aided Dispatch [CAD] system are frustrating public safety agencies. McLean County is implementing a new suite of software applications to speed up fire and police response in the county.
It has not gone well.
Seconds can matter in responses to fires, medical events and calls for police help. The CAD and Automatic Vehicle Location [AVL] from the ProPhoenix firm, headquartered in New Jersey and Chennai, India, is intended to replace an older system long used by the county and Normal. Bloomington has its own version.
The Metro Mclean County Centralized Communication Center [Metcom] Board and the county signed the contract to buy the system in late 2024. ProPhoenix had promised to have it up and running in less than a year. Nearly two years later, Normal Police Chief Steve Petrilli said it's still not working as advertised.
"We're still undergoing several large projects within the county, and it's just frustrating when they have projects that cost this much to the taxpayers. They require hours upon hours of staff time and to not get them across the finish line and an end product that we feel is making us more efficient, more effective at what we do, that's the frustrating part," said Petrilli.
The county paid more than $526,000 to buy the package and the first year of support. The second year of support cost $135,000. The second-year figure included additional service for the Illinois State University Police Department. Next year, the cost will be $145,000, which includes a station alerting interface which allows dispatchers to push a button and dispatch a unit via an automated voice while they continue to take a caller’s information. Apart from additional modules, each annual fee increases 5%, according to the county administration.
It's supposed to make mutual aid easier
The Computer Aided Dispatch and Automatic Vehicle Location is supposed to, for the first time, make precise location of rural and urban fire, police, and medical units visible to dispatchers so they can send the closest unit to a call.
Bloomington has had AVL for years for its own units.
Normal Fire Chief Mick Humer said the county vehicle location is also supposed to play nice with the Bloomington system. Humer said the optimal way to do mutual aid is for Bloomington and Normal dispatchers to see where units in the other municipality are in real time instead of dispatching the other city's unit from static maps of fire stations.
"That has not happened. And so now, if Bloomington needs an ambulance or an engine from Normal, they call on the radio and say, "Hey, you know, we need an engine at 123 Main Street, or whatever. Our dispatchers would take the call, enter it, and then they tone it out, and then our units would respond. And that takes time," said Humer.
Indeed, a hoped-for decrease in response time from AVL and CAD was a part of the town's resistance earlier this year to Firefighter Union suggestions that the town add a fire station.
Humer said another glitch has involved information loss on what are called "run cards." That's a reference tool that shows which fire companies or units are assigned to respond to specific locations in a city.
"For some reason it wipes out work that had been done, and then we have to start over from square one and enter that data again," said Humer.
Humer said ProPhoenix also does not yet have functional geofencing which lets a fire department automatically record run times to calls instead of figuring it out from dispatch logs and recording it by hand.
"It always seems like it's one step forward, two steps back," said Humer.
The Normal Fire Department has also gone to a different alerting system. The hope was that the dispatcher would start typing the call in, and then the computer would generate a voice and give the call. That would make it nearly instantaneous and save seconds. That's not yet functioning, though the company is adding an interface.
Growing pains
Growing pains for new tech systems are common. There were similar headaches to get a new criminal justice record management system up and running last year.
In this case, Bloomington Emergency Communication System Manager Darren Wolf said the city and county run on different platforms than the city. Bloomington uses a system by Tyler Technologies.
"Their technology people at ProPhoenix and the people at Tyler [Technologies] need to talk to each other, and they need to really come up with the same language, right? They need to come up with how are we going to make our two interfaces work," said Wolf.
Wolf said there's no projected delivery date for that part of the project. Metcom said, though, ProPhoenix has told them the ball is in Tyler Technologies' court and the estimated wait time is still five months.
There are problems with CAD for rural fire departments. Brett Lueschen is the Towanda Fire Chief and the head of Division 41 of the Mutual Aid Box Alarm System [MABAS].
Included in Division 41 are Bloomington, Normal, Towanda, Lexington, Carlock, Danvers and the Octavia Fire District. That’s almost every department within McLean County.
Lueschen said you can have the best dispatchers in the world but if the software doesn't help them, it makes their lives tough.
Say there's an accident on Interstate 55 reported by motorists. People driving by don't always get the mile marker right. Metcom should be able to use CAD to update information on the iPads in rural fire engines and ambulances with a single mouse click. Even after a year up and running, that information is getting to rural fire units slower than desired, by radio. Lueschen said it could even erroneously dispatch a fire unit instead of an ambulance based on wrong information from callers.
And in some fringe areas of McLean County, radio reception can be an issue.
Lueschen is also critical about the interface. He said information is spread across multiple display tabs, which can take time for rural responders to navigate.
'Serious concerns'
Here's another wrinkle. Software gets automatic updates. The iPads aren't always on. Lueschen said 85% of the time rural firefighters have to either reboot the iPad while on a call or call Metcom and have dispatchers unlock access so the iPad can get current information.
Lueschen sent a letter to the McLean County Board in March registering "serious concerns."
A different letter from the Metcom Board sent to ProPheonix in mid-April also expressed frustration. The letter called ProPhoenix’s performance “insufficient." It said the company promised it would deliver a “turnkey, Commercial-Off-The-Shelf [COTS] system that does not require design.
"ProPhoenix has failed to deliver a system conforming to those representations and Metcom has yet to receive the product it bargained for,” said the letter.
Lueschen said some of the hitches happened because ProPhoenix didn't even give the county the right version of software.
“When they purchased the software, they didn't actually purchase the fire side of the CAD. They were trying to make what ProPhoenix provided to them work for the fire side," said Lueschen.
“We had been going back and forth with ProPhoenix for months prior to the letter being sent pointing out where police could use a feature, such as geofencing, but fire/EMS agencies were not able to leverage the same feature. Eventually we were able to get out of their backend techs that their fire RMS [record management system] was needed to resolve most of the issues we have been experiencing,” said Adam Carney, Metcom assistant director of technical services.
The company has now provided the different software at no cost.
“Now that we have the 'Fire RMS Lite' piece we have already seen a sizable increase in what is available to fire personnel while testing internally. We’ll also be working with a few of our 'power user' agencies to work further kinks out of the system before implementing it in the production environment. This way we are providing a more polished product when all fire and EMS agencies are transitioned to the Fire RMS Lite platform,” said Carney.
Carney said company responsiveness has also improved of late. He said they went from an average of 40 ongoing tech issues at a time down to eight.
“I think they were possibly biting off more than they could chew. We were one of the bigger multi juris[diction] deals that they had. We have to deal with 45 to 50 agencies at any given time,” said Carney.
Carney said Galesburg and Knox County were the first ProPhoenix system in the state to go live. The Galesburg area population is much lower than McLean County but he said they have nearly as many agencies as McLean County. Carney said Knox County was satisfied with ProPhoenix when McLean people visited.
Carney said ProPhoenix has had turnover. Three different company project managers have worked with the county. Another way the county said ProPhoenix did not meet its specs is the allocation of work. Carney ended up putting in 100 hour weeks for several months because he was dealing with project management on the county side and doing technical implementation.
McLean County 911 System Manager Brandon Lacey said that should not have happened.
“The tech work that was supposed to be on Adam's shoulders was supposed to be minimal, so he could have actually done the project management. The amount of work that ended up being expected out of him by the vendor was substantially more,” said Lacey.
The troubles are not all on the back of the vendor. Various sources said there's "some blame" to go around. In hindsight, the county could have hired a fulltime project manager dedicated to the effort.
Brett Lueschen of the Mutual Aid Box Alarm Association said rural fire departments did not have enough input. Adam Carney of Metcom said they did ask and some of the more tech-forward departments responded. Others said there could have been more effort to get feedback on the needs of less tech savvy rural departments.
After the county became aware the company didn't provide the right software and moved ahead with its formal letter of complaint, Metcom Director Rhonda Flegel resigned. Her position has been filled on an interim basis pending a search.
"Not only has there been communication issues, I think, between the former director and the vendor. I think there's also been, you know, just the fact that the vendor hasn't been responsive in the way in which we'd like to see," said Normal Police Chief and Metcom Board member Steve Petrilli.
Rhonda Flegel declined to talk with WGLT about the history of the project.
Petrilli said it's possible Metcom will make more demands of ProPhoenix or look elsewhere.
"I think all options are being explored right now," said Petrilli.
WGLT asked ProPhoenix for an interview. The company initially said yes but pulled back to a short statement after it became aware of the topic of the request.
"ProPhoenix maintains a long-standing policy not to comment publicly on matters involving active customers, ongoing projects or customer relationships," said the statement.
Metcom's contract with the company runs up to 15 years with opt-out clauses after each five-year period.
