Members of the Carroll County Board of Commissioners are questioning why new E-911 Director Trisha Orr is pushing for a new computer-assisted dispatch system for the department when the system the county currently uses is about two years old and came at a cost of $400,000.

The board voted unanimously on Tuesday to table an agenda item that would have had them vote on whether to purchase a new CAD system from LAS Systems Inc., a Roopville database engineering company, following discussion on the matter at a work session that preceded the meeting.

The reason, said Commissioner Vicki Anderson, was that it wasn’t clear why the county needed to purchase a new system, just as it wasn’t clear why the existing system falls short of what the department requires of it.

While Orr outlined in a presentation during the work session the potential problems with the current system — including sending emergency responders to the wrong address — Anderson said it seemed like the system itself was fully functional, and there wasn’t anything so drastically wrong with it that a completely new system would need to be purchased at a hefty cost.

The proposals from LAS outline the projected costs of the system, with the CAD portion coming at a total of $5,000 a month to be paid over three months; an additional geographic information system, used to pinpoint where callers are in the county, coming at $5,715 a month to be paid for a calendar year; and a digital map base coming at $5,415 a month to be paid for 12 months. This comes to a total of nearly $150,000.

Anderson said Orr didn’t once stress that the system needed to be replaced immediately, nor did she indicate that it was all that important in terms of helping responders field emergency calls.

“I didn’t get a feeling of urgency or that there was any real problem with the current system or that there was anything happening or going to happen that had not been happening all along,” she said. “I don’t think there were as many issues addressed that were wrong with the current system so much of what the new system could do. I don’t think there was an acute issue that really needed to be addressed.”

Commissioner Trent North, the longest serving member of the board, said the current system was actually purchased four years ago, but because of a technical problem, the entire system was replaced with a brand new system less than two years ago, with the ultimate cost to the county at roughly $400,000. Even if the system is still experiencing the occasional glitch, as Orr suggested, that’s the way technology works, and instead of purchasing a completely new system, the county should work toward fixing the system that is now in place, North said.

Coweta County, where Orr worked prior to coming to Carroll County, employs an LAS system at its E-911 department, but that department fields significantly fewer calls annually than the Carroll County 911 center because the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office has its own dispatchers, lessening the load on that county’s 911 call center, North said.

“My question is, why are we going to go to a system that has yet to be proven with the kind of call volume we have?” North said. “And I don’t know the answer to that.”

Commissioner Ashley Hendrix said Orr’s motives for pushing for the system aren’t clear, but her time working in Coweta County might be playing a role. Hendrix said it’s hard to see a difference between the two systems, and because of that, it begs to reason that the county doesn’t need to authorize any change.

“I was just curious if this was a matter of preference or not,” Hendrix said. “I tried to do a little bit of research on both systems, and I just wonder if it’s a matter of preference for her.”