Management of Vermont’s 911 emergency communications service will transition to FairPoint Communications in 2015.
The North Carolina-based company, plagued by residential service complaints and, since Oct. 17, a union strike throughout Northern New England, won a competitive bid for the five-year contract that took effect Nov. 5.
FairPoint will have nine months to implement its system and transition from the current provider, Intrado Inc., of Colorado. The company will be paid $1.8 million for the set-up, followed by a total of roughly $9.5 million for 60 months of operations and maintenance.
FairPoint’s bid came in about $2.5 million lower than those of its two competitors, Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding said Wednesday. He said FairPoint was the only bidder willing to commit to all of the state’s performance requirements, and that the state felt secure in its contractual protections.
“We wanted to make sure that in the event of a sale, acquisition or merger, we wouldn’t incur extra costs,” Spaulding said. “And that they had the ability to do the job, in light of the current workplace situation.”
All parts of Vermont can call for emergency services through the state’s Enhanced 911 system. David Tucker, executive director of the Enhanced 911 Board, said the current “Next Generation” E 911 platform employs a private Internet Protocol network (different from the public Internet) to transmit data. Every call and text message is routed to one of eight answering points using Voice Over Internet Protocols (VoIP).
Intrado’s system currently uses much of FairPoint’s physical infrastructure to deliver these services, and FairPoint is a longstanding subcontractor to Intrado, Tucker said. He said the outage that occurred in August was not related to the part of the system under FairPoint’s control.
FairPoint spokeswoman Angelynne Amores Beaudry said the company has been involved in E 911 services for more than 15 years.
“Our number one priority is public safety; we are the logical and proven partner for Vermont’s upgrade,” she said, noting core network reliability of “99.999%” that will allow swift responses to any network problems.
The company’s track record with residential service in Vermont, however, has been problematic for more than a year. The Public Service Board is looking into a history of complaints about repair times and invoicing mistakes as the board contemplates FairPoint’s application for continued regulatory approval to operate in the state. Its current Incentive Regulation Plan expires in March.
Tucker said he was aware of the residential service issues, but that the 911 service is a different product. Despite being under the management of the same company, he said he does not expect the emergency services to be subject to the same weaknesses.
He said officials also weighed FairPoint’s financial viability. The publicly traded company’s stocks tumbled after the strike in October, and its history of bankruptcy — declared soon after its 2007 acquisition of Verizon’s land lines in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine — still resonates with many Vermonters.
Tucker said the contract is written to clarify that costs cannot go up if the firm comes under new management, and that service cannot be passed to another provider without state approval.
“This is a mission-critical service. It is a big deal, and I understand that people have questions and there will be people that have issues about the transition,” Tucker said. He recalled working at the Department of Information and Innovation at the time of FairPoint’s rocky acquisition of Verizon’s land lines.
“We were painfully aware of the transition issues that they had,” Tucker said.
Ultimately, he said, the E 911 Board and Gov. Peter Shumlin’s administration felt FairPoint could be relied upon.
In light of the bankruptcy, Tucker said he and Spaulding asked FairPoint’s chief financial officer why the state should believe the company is more stable now. In part, he said, it’s precisely because the company is expanding its services into emergency communications systems.
Since taking over from Verizon, FairPoint also has managed the emergency network in Maine, a spokesperson for the Maine Public Utilities Commission confirmed. Harry Lanphear said FairPoint recently completed an upgrade to its Next Generation system there, as part of a $32 million contract.
Beaudry said FairPoint also provides E 911 services in parts of Florida, one of the 17 states in which it operates.
“They’re broadening their revenue base,” Tucker said. “So that’s only likely to lead to more stability, not instability.”
Tucker said FairPoint will contract with two firms to assist with implementation: Ontario-based Solacom Technologies, for call-handling equipment, and Minnesota-based GeoComm for mapping.
These are the same two contractors with which FairPoint has been working in Maine. Tucker said the company’s success in that state is part of what reassured him about trusting FairPoint with emergency communications in Vermont.
In the event FairPoint is not ready to take over operations according to schedule in nine months, Tucker said the state worked a provision into the contract to cover extra costs the state might incur. Instead of paying FairPoint for operations, Vermont would pay Intrado to continue providing its service. If Intrado’s service costs more than FairPoint’s, then FairPoint would have to make up the difference, up to $30,000 per month.
This agreement with Intrado is currently being discussed, Tucker said, but and he expects that company’s officials will agree, despite being disappointed they did not win the bid to renew their service in Vermont.
If ongoing service standards are not met, or any of the systems fail once FairPoint takes over, Tucker said the contract allows for “liquidated damages,” much like penalties, for each incident. He added that the window of time in which any failure must be corrected is tight: just two hours, for example, for failure of one of the maps a call-taker uses to locate a person in need.
These standards are much more stringent than the response times FairPoint has been able to meet for residential service, where outages upward of 10 days have been reported.
UPDATE: This article was updated with comments from FairPoint, and with a clarification about the network on which Vermont’s E 911 system is transmitted, at 9:43 p.m. on Nov. 13, 2014.
CORRECTION: This article was corrected at 10:10 p.m. on Nov. 15, 2014. The name of the Ontario-based company subcontracting to FairPoint is Solacom Technologies.
