Council Will Spend $67K To Upgrade Borough Technology

Council plans to spend $67,000 for a much-needed upgrade to the borough’s computers servers and equipment at the

The New Jersey State Police began requesting this change two years ago and Council President Michael Gennaro said the council can't put it off any longer.

“Our networks are suffering from insufficient capacity, our hardware is obsolete and there’s a whole range of reasons why we need to do this,” Gennaro said. “A lot of this money is coming from previous capital authorizations that we did not use in prior years.”

Borough Administrator Doug Marvin said this is a significant project that will require a lot of time, effort and new equipment, but it will help move the borough forward “to what they’re calling a virtualized environment."

Councilman Bob Robinson said as he understands it, the work would take 125 hours to complete and would be performed on the weekends. But he asked George Hayes, who performs IT work for the borough, to elaborate on the time this project will indeed take and if it poses any risk to residents trying to reach the .

Hayes said there would not be an impact on the production environment as long as all goes as planned and he will be building this new network while the old system is still in place.

“If by any chance there is a problem and systems don’t come up by Monday morning, we role back to the old system, try to figure out what went wrong and make the attempt on the following weekend,” Hayes explained.

Marvin reassured council that the work would not impact contact from residents to the police department.

“This is primarily to deal with computers within the building. It’s not going to impact police mobile data computers and contact from outside to the police department,” Marvin explained. “The purchases from the project will be made in accordance with all regular purchasing guidelines so you’ll see purchase orders coming through [on future council agendas] for pieces of equipment, but I wanted to explain the whole project at one time so as you saw the purchase orders coming through, you all understand it’s part of [the same project].”

Gennaro reiterated that the current system will eventually collapse so the project needs to be done now.

“These things will be breaking down, there will be difficulty repairing them because they are obsolete, we can’t get warranties in place anymore,” he said. “This is something you have to do with IT equipment, and we’re probably overdue for it.”