ADRIAN — The Lenawee County Commission on March 27 approved the purchase and installation of a backup HVAC system for the county dispatch center, at an estimated cost of $37,425.
According to Sheriff Troy Bevier, the dispatch system in the sheriff’s office is inconsistent and unreliable.
In June 2024, Bevier stated in a report to the commission, a breakdown that took several days to repair resulted in temperatures inside the dispatch center being in the 80s for six days.
“When [the HVAC system] goes down, they have to run fans in there,” said commissioner David Aungst (R-Rollin Twp.). “It gets really hot., and of course fans bring noise. It’s very important that they have an HVAC system that is working properly. They’re in there 24/7.”
The commission also approved a five-year contract with Whelen Engineering for a cloud-based system that helps monitor the sheriff’s department’s patrol vehicles. The cost is $6,120 per year for 17 vehicles.
For the past three years, Lenawee County has been a test site for Whelen’s platform, and Capt. Jake Pifer told commissioners the system has been working very well. He also said Whelen has been responsive to all of the department’s requests for improvements.
“They’ve listened to everything we’ve asked for and given more,” he said.
In addition to diagnosing problems with emergency equipment and tracking routine maintenance like oil changes, the system always knows where patrol cars are. This has several benefits, Pifer said. One is that if two cars are responding to the same scene, the deputies in the cars will be alerted when they’re getting close to each other.
Another benefit, Pifer said, is that if a crime is reported — such as a rash of breaking-and-entering incidents — the sheriff’s department can go back over the records and see if there were any patrol cars in the area at the time, and find out if the deputies driving the cars saw anything that they might not have realized was significant at the time.
The Whelen system also sends data to the navigation service Waze, which does things like alerting drivers when there is a crash ahead of them.
