Lighted Gates

The new LED lighted gates were installed today, they are an upgrade to the old gates in various ways.

This was ZERO cost to the community.

This current 5 person board inherited our, under contract, Security system.  The last Envera contract was a 1 year renewal at approx $220k per annum, 6 months prior to the end of that contract the board directed staff to find and send out RFPs to whomever wanted to take over our security monitoring, we also directed them to look into live guards , not greeters, guards.

The costs for guards, that can actually do something, was way more than we could afford in the current budget, especially since we knew the seawall funding was going to be short.  We did receive 3 bidders for the monitoring system , all 3 were essentially the same with some small nuances in the system itself.  The major differences were; one bidder head-end (the electronic gear and monitoring), is located in Los Angeles, one was outsourcing their actual system (thus we would deal with 2 vendors in theory), the third was local.

I personally met with one of the vendors twice and offered suggestions and recommendations that would help our community; such as lower pricing for option years and technology upgrades, they were responsive to those meetings and thus came in $26K lower per year; plus by the end of their presentation they offered $80k in upgrades to the community, this put them over the top and were voted in.

The board got together to discuss what upgrades would be beneficial and/or most needed from a list of items available.   There are some that can not be mentioned do to security concerns (No we don’t want to give away how to get around the system!!!), The gates were one of those upgrades, and here they are!

What I mentioned here is merely the tip of the iceberg about the system we have.  There is a lot of detail that goes into this that would probably take hours for the full understanding for all the how’s and why’s  I am sure you are all asking. (disclaimer: keep in mind there are things that can not be disclosed).  Are there shortcomings, of course, there is no perfect answer for Mira Bay.

We have to look at Mira Bay  from 1000 feet above looking down, and then take into consideration the topography .  We will learn quickly that this community is not closed in by a long shot.  There are so many ingress points that there is no way a live guard of any type could cover it, so even if we could afford the guards, things will be missed. We have to accept that fact.

What our current system does; it offers the most coverage we can get for what we can afford at this time.  I agree the next step is to reduce to 1 gate, but that is a cost that we can ballpark at $250K, (that idea I give credit to another Supervisor), but the cost for Class D guards  (the kind that can actually do something) I have been told as much as $300-400K for 1 gate!!  However I have done some research and visited similar neighborhoods like ours (IE fairly wide open) and I am proposing a plan to augment our current system that will show a physical presence.

I will be presenting that at the next meeting and as long as I can get the votes to move funding from another system we tried that historically had little to no impact there will be no added cost.

Feel free to contact me with your questions, again, this is security, I’ll answer what I can.