Lake City Report -
July 8, 2011
Pipeline Safety and
Broadband on tap
Columbia
County, FL (Posted July 9, 2011 04:30 am )
by City Manager Wendell Johnson and
staff
From City Manager Wendell Johnson
PSC annual gas pipeline safety evaluation
The PSC Gas Utility System Engineer recently
completed the City’s 2011 Natural Gas Pipeline
Safety Evaluation. This comprehensive inspection
consisted of a review and verification of
related documents, field tests and interviews
with Gas Department employees.
The City’s Natural Gas System was found in
compliance with state and federal safety rules
in all areas evaluated – no deficiencies were
found.
Kudos to Superintendent Joe Sheldon and all
employees of the City Gas Department – Thanks
for a great job.
North Florida Broadband Authority (NFBA)
The $30 million NFBA Broadband Grant Project
continues to move ahead to enable high-speed
connectivity for our 14-county region.
The
NFBA will have a core broadband network
consisting of 93 towers throughout the 14-county
region and is expected to be operational during
2012.
NFBA update
System Deployment Is Underway:
• NFBA has contractors in the field.
• The Engineer has Project Managers in the field
• The Engineer has set up an Office-Warehouse
facility in Lake City to facilitate a fixed
market presence within the RACEC. The facility
is 5,800 square feet and located at 1985 W Main
Street.
• The Safety and QA Manager has people in the
field
• Crown Castle and American tower site owners
have project managers in the field
• NFBA awarded Civil Sub-Contractors are out in
the field
• Local Work Force is engaged
• 76 OF 94 site leases with tower companies have
been executed
What's next for the NFBA:
Continued deployment of Operational and Business
Support Systems with Microsoft / Cisco, Sugar
CRM, Quickbooks Enterprise configuration and
server support. This enables NFBA to operate
“today” while laying flexible architecture to
build a carrier’s OSS/BSS that will take it into
“tomorrow.”
This week from the staff reports. Some interesting facts.
Information Technology / G.I.S. / Communications
(Zack Mears):
• We are near completion of the
consolidation of websites for centralization of
management.
• Continued the rebuild of City sites in new
back-end program.
• Continued work on reclaim water plan and
profile in Geographical Information System.
• Everbridge project is nearly complete. The
employee portion has been setup and the citizen
file is in validation. The geographical
validation is complete for addressing. The
Everbridge project is the City alert system to
residences, businesses and City utility
customers.
• Lock Box project file testing has been
successful thus far and should be live soon.
• Collected Geographical Positioning System data
for utilities (hydrants and manholes).
• Setup has begun on Police Department’s new
virtual server environment.
• Planning stage of fiber project is nearly
complete and requisitioning has begun.
The City Staff Report is available in pdf format
here.
