There are many departments of communications, information technologies (IT), and information services (IS) located in the Mat-Su Borough. They all have many talented professionals providing valuable and critical services to the agencies they serve. The efficiency of all these needed departments could be greatly improved and therefore the cost of operating them reduced by one simple thing: cooperation. The competitive and secret manner in which many of these departments operate, is unnecessary and costs the taxpayers extra thousands, maybe millions of dollars every year.

     The solution to this is to form an interagency communications committee made up of at least one employee from each IT, IS, and Comms. department of every governmental entity located in the Mat-Su Borough. This should include all of them, from the smallest school, the school board, the borough, the cities, libraries, UAA Mat-Su, and all state and federal government departments that have an office located in the Mat-Su Borough.

     If all of these computer and communication departments possessed a spirit of “cooperation” and sharing, instead of “competition” and secrecy, then each one of them would not have to re-invent the wheel every time new technologies, software, or hardware came along. I believe much duplication could be eliminated and all these departments could operate much more efficiently if they not only shared information, ideas, planning, and lessons learned, but also shared, where possible, servers, networks, phone systems, radio networks, and personnel.

     Former Wasilla police chief Charlie Fannon has done an outstanding job to move us into the 21st century as far as public safety communications. He has solicited the support of most local and State agencies that use 2-way radios in this area and secured federal funding to build a new dispatch center that would utilize new state-of-the-art digital radios and computer networks.

     I wholeheartedly support this awesome project. It would have many major benefits for public safety. Just a few of these are: secure communications (to keep criminals from monitoring), any radio that is lost or stolen can be remotely disabled, faster and more efficient access to criminal records, and compatibility with federal agencies. This last one would be most important in a major disaster or joint operations.