The Guthrie City Council on Monday approved the awarding of a grant from the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management (ODEM) funding up to 50% of a multi discipline training center, and off-site communications center.
The grant totals $928,418.20, of which the city would pay 50%, or $464,209, and $315,000 would be allocated to the project in the current fiscal year. Anything above the money allocated this fiscal year would only be spent within the next two fiscal years, and only if budgeted and approved by the City Council.
Guthrie Police Sgt. Anthony Gibbs told the Council the City has no place to conduct regular training – this includes police, fire, EMS and the public.
He said the department currently uses the training rooms at the fire department and Logan County Sheriff ’s Office, as well as the council chambers. All are less than ideal locations and facilities.
“Ultimately, the location of that has not been decided yet, however, what that would do for us is create a place for us to be able to hold some even better training,” Gibbs said. “(We would like) a place that’s big enough to put some defensive tactics, training mats, so you could host, say 30 to 50 students at any given time. That creates quite a bit of space.”
Gibbs said the new space would create an off-site dispatch center should City Hall ever be compromised.
“It creates an off-site dispatch center for us, should city hall ever become compromised, and we’re not just talking about an event that happens out front where we need to relocate, but if we have power outages, et cetera,” he said. “We can relocate the communication center to an off-site location and continue to provide services to the city.”
Gibbs said having a new off-site dispatch center/training site could raise Guthrie’s ISO certification rating.
ISO s t ands for Insurance Services Office (ISO), which is an independent, for-profit organization. The ISO scores fire departments on how they are doing against its organization’s standards to determine property insurance costs.
After analyzing the data it collects, the ISO assigns a Public Protection Classification (PPC) on a scale from 1 to 10.