By Mary Thurwachter
The Lantana Town Council voted during its Oct. 11 meeting to spend more than $400,000 over the next five years for communication center equipment.
“The initial cost is $280,000 for all the equipment and installation,” Police Chief Sean Scheller said. The balance will be spent on maintenance — between $20,000 and $25,000 a year.
“The current equipment in dispatch was bought by the town in the early 1990s — used — from the city of Lake Worth,” Scheller said. “We’re on a lot of borrowed time with the communications system. As of Oct. 1, the maintenance and warranty are all gone.”
The new, state-of-the art Motorola equipment will allow Lantana police to better communicate with other agencies.
Police Commander Thomas Mitchell said that “the county will be going to this as they replace and upgrade all their dispatch locations.”
Mitchell said there have been instances in the past two years when Lantana officers were unable to communicate with other law enforcement departments because they were not on the same frequency as the Sheriff ’s Office.
“When we had protests last year in Lake Worth, Lantana radios didn’t interface with others,” Mitchell said. “We had to communicate through cellphones. That’s not the way to do business and that’s not the way to keep everybody safe.”
He said having encrypted channels, which the new equipment will provide, is extremely important. “It’s also going to give us the ability in a critical incident where we can patch radio channels. This is going to put us in current trends with Palm Beach County and other agencies throughout the state. It’s much needed.”
Equipment is expected to arrive in three to five weeks and will take another few days for installation.
The Town Council unanimously voted for the expenditure.
“This is long overdue,” said council member Lynn Moorhouse.
In other action, the town voted 3-2 (with Moorhouse and Karen Lythgoe dissenting) not to accept a bid of $336,270 from West Construction to build an ADA-compliant beach access ramp. Other options will be explored instead.
The ramp in question was destroyed by a storm in September. The city quickly filed an insurance claim and began to design the ramp under discussion.
But Operations Director Eddie Crockett described a big discrepancy between the two lowest bids, so much so that the lowest bidder was studied and then dropped. “We moved to the next-highest bidder,” West Construction.
Council members debated whether to build a permanent or retractable ramp.
Crockett said the last ADA ramp, which had removable panels, was “extremely time consuming and extremely difficult to take apart and put it back together,” and he did not recommend that design. Mayor Robert Hagerty said the council needed to recognize that engineering plans were different from those used to build the previous ramp.
“This ramp has been redesigned and engineered differently to where it would withstand that type of condition letting the water pass through instead of having solid surfaces where the water would beat against it and push it out and destroy it,” Hagerty said.
But the design for a permanent ramp that the council seemed to favor sparked public comments from several residents who urged them to look more closely at a retractable ramp.
Jeff Tellex of South Palm Beach, CEO and managing partner of Atlantic Aluminum & Marine Products Inc., says he works with a company that does this kind of project up and down the coast. He suggested more research is needed.
“We built multiple structures for homes, condominiums, Lantana beach lifeguard ramp — and retractable is the way to go,” Tellex said. “This has been discussed with a whole lot of locals who have knowledge over many years.
“I grew up here, I’ve seen lifeguard tower after lifeguard tower get washed into the ocean. The only thing I’m begging you to do is revisit it, look at a retractable system.”
Moorhouse wanted to accept the bid from West Construction.
“We put this out to bid a long time ago and I had been in favor of some retractable, removable hydraulic, whatever … and was told that it was going to be a lot more expensive and probably not as satisfactory as what we’ve got cooking here. So, my feeling is we either believe our engineers or we don’t, but we can’t just break the process.”
But the majority of council members chose to do further research and deny the West bid.
“I think it would be a good idea if we could look at his drawings or ask questions about this,” council member Malcolm Balfour said before making the motion to deny the bid and direct staff to listen to a presentation from Tellex.
In other business, the town:
• Renewed the annual $1 lease with the Lantana Chamber of Commerce for the town-owned building at 212 Iris Ave.
• Approved a request from West Construction for a temporary easement (through Dec. 31) at the south side of the town beach during the construction/renovation of Eau Palm Beach.
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