I.                   Review and approval of minutes of May 22, 2003.

Moved by Chuck Dickerson and Seconded by Will Johnson and carried that the minutes of June 4, 2003 be approved.

II.                Discussion and finalization of specifications for the communications trailers

A video was shown from the Raytheon First Responder Program. Mr. McFarland used this video to show how this technology can be used on our trailers instead of buying a high-priced vehicle.  Mr. McFarland said that this trailer could be used to bridge communications from county to county in a disaster situation. Discussion followed. Mr. Eric Epley, Executive Director of Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council for Trauma discussed how he outfitted his communications trailer to an operations level.

            Mr. Schneider suggested the establishment of a working group to address the specifications of the communications trailers. The volunteers who committed themselves to the communications working group are:

            Brett Schneider

            Eric Epley

            Stan Erwin

            Rusty Hierholzer

            Will Johnson

            John Sheppard

            Joe Tackitt

III.             Development of the Pager Notification System.

Mr. McFarland discussed how a pager notification system would give us the ability to notify a large number of people in a wide area so that if you are within a 12 county COG Region all it would take would be one call or two calls to reach all subscribers.

Mr. McFarland advised that it was the recommendation from the DEM to have only one or two venders because the State did not want to have the responsibility to have to make multiple calls.

Mr. McFarland was told that the more steps that would be put in the more likely we would have failures. Don advised that the state is still working on an alerting system and at this time we don’t want to commit ourselves to anything costly until we get direction from the state.

IV.              Discussion of WEB EOC and Virtual EOC

Mr. Schneider discussed how this would be a way to communicate by alerting you to turn on the WEB EOC or Virtual EOC.  The Virtual Emergency Operations Center is a crisis  

management screen.  Mr. Epley demonstrated WEB EOC to the members of the committee by viewing STRAC WEB EOC on line.

Chief, Mike Miller stated they he put the system to a test by using this system with one hour’s worth of training. He used this system on a training exercise without having prior experience using this system. Mr. McFarland said it takes people inputting lots of data entries to have the system work and that reports are generated with ease. Mr. Miller advised that this is one cost that lets you build the boards that you want and it’s a tracking mechanism for financial recovery.

An allocation of $100,000 from Domestic Preparedness funding was recommended by the REPAC and approved by the AACOG Board to purchase two Virtual EOC. One system will be downtown for the City of San Antonio and a second one is to be owned by Bexar County and housed by AACOG and the two systems will have the ability to back each other up.

Mr. McFarland asked if the communications committee wanted to investigate other products or to go with WEB EOC so that we can be compatible with the medical community. Discussion followed.

            Moved by Chuck Dickerson and carried by Jim Koehler to purchase Virtual Emergency Operations Command System (EOC) software and related equipment with two servers not to exceed $100,000 from WEB EOC.

            A discussion followed regarding Group Paging

            Mr. McFarland stated that we are proceeding with the e-mail reflector. The price on the server will be established. The e-mail reflector will allow us to send e-mails to anyone within the region who has subscribed to a particular list

            Next meeting will be in August.  Date TBA.

V.                 Adjournment

Meeting adjourned at 11:30 a.m.