The University tends to solve safety problems quickly. Thefts in Lisner? New security guards and more patrols. Increase in street crime? It sends the Department of Public Safety and Metropolitan Police Department officers out on the street, and works with local government to get more streetlights. A working call box system? Well, that’s more of a challenge.
The call boxes have been the monkey on the University’s back for a year, and they aren’t finished yet. Now, though, the University is taking a hard line with the call box vendor and demanding results. It’s a good decision, just one we wish had been made earlier.
In late summer 2004, the University hired Security Systems Technology, an electronic security firm, to install additional call boxes across campus and integrate them into the previous system. The call boxes, now a hallmark of college campus across the country, provide a fast way to contact DPS in an emergency, as well as a sense of safety. They’re also a selling point in every pre-frosh tour.
But by last spring, construction was not complete and campus was littered with inactive boxes. We wrote an editorial calling for the boxes to be fixed. We were told that the University had a timetable in place for the system’s completion, but at the beginning of this school year they were still not complete.
Last week, Vice President for Safety and Security David Morrell sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing that SST had until the end of November to uninstall the boxes and fix the problem or it would lose the contract. An SST spokesperson said that the University had requested they not comment on the issue.
In an interview, Morrell told the Voice that the issues consistently arising did not meet the University’s standards.
“You should reasonably expect that a life safety system is reliable,” Morrel said. “It’s not that they all of the sudden materialized, but it reached a point where the summation of technical issues required the University to put the vendor on notice.”
According to Morrell, the decision to hold the vendor accountable now was made by University Facilities Managament, which supervises the contract, with Morrell’s agreement.
Hopefully, SST will get the call boxes in working order by the deadline. If not, the University should find a contractor who will earn the $450,000 being spent on this project by the first deadline???and not force the Administration to threaten them to get the job done. Looking back, we wish that the University had dealt with this problem sooner and with more transparency.
In the future, we hope that the sight of (functional) blue call boxes on campus will remind University administrators to get the lead out earlier with stodgy contractors???and keep students clearly informed of their progress.
