City of Glen Cove looks to upgrade its technology
Communication could be digitized in city buildings
A planned City of Glen Cove information-technology infrastructure project would cost the municipality more than $750,000 over the next five years, Mayor Tim Tenke said after a presentation on the proposal at a March 3 pre-council meeting.
Glen Cove IT Director Anthony Frisa presented the plan, which would cost the city a little over $126,000 a year for the next half-decade. The City Council will vote on the plan at its next meeting on March 10.
“There has not been a comprehensive upgrade to our IT [at City Hall] and the other buildings in Glen Cove for forever,” Tenke said.
The city would finance the project with a loan, which would be funded by the city’s annual budget, Councilwoman Marsha Silverman said.
Phone lines would be updated and upgraded, Frisa said, noting that the city’s phone system is 21 years old. Employees cannot durrently dial between city agencies, he said. Each agency has its own phone number and set of extensions, so residents who call in cannot be transferred from one agency to another. With the upgrade, all of that would change.
With the new system, Frisa also said, phone numbers could be easily reprogrammed if employees moved from one office to another, enabling them to keep the same extensions.
The digitalization of the city’s phone lines would do away with its old copper lines, he said. City Hall and the Glen Cove Senior Center would be focal points of the project.
The phone line digitization project should be completed by the end of 2020, Frisa said.
The city also plans to add 75-inch television screens behind the council, as well as camera equipment by the dais or the public comment lectern. This would enable a city employee to project agenda items onto the screens so attendees could follow along, Frisa said.
Tenke said this would enable audience members to see photos or documents that residents might want to present to the council. Such exhibits cannot now be displayed.
Frisa said the screens would be positioned so as not to obstruct the view of the large windows behind the council’s dais. New and improved live-streaming equipment could also be in the works, he said.
The project may come in under budget, Frisa added. “The beauty of this,” he said, “is that if I come under budget after all’s said and done, now we just take that extra money, put it back toward the loan, and it lowers our payments.“
Councilman Gaitley Stevenson-Mathews suggested a multi-directional microphone at the public comment lectern. Some residents do not speak directly into the microphone or walk around it, he said, making it difficult for the rest of the chamber to hear what is said. A multi-directional microphone would solve that problem. Frisa said the IT department would look into that.
