Cell phones for city will cost $1,000 less with contract
Published 12:00 am Thursday, October 23, 2003
[10/23/03] City officials say cell phone bills could be going down after a new contract is approved for 78 employees who are issued phones.
Tim Smith, special project coordinator for the City of Vicksburg, said competition among vendors could save about $1,000 per month of the $4,000 the city has been paying monthly.
The new contract with AT&T Wireless is expected to be approved Friday by the Mayor and Aldermen. It offers a flat rate of $2,975 per month for 35,600 minutes to be shared among all city cell phones. It calculates to about $40 per month per phone.
Mayor Laurence Leyens said the city will also work to reduce the amount of cell phone usage by employees. “We’re just finding a lot of personal time (on cell phones) on the clock,” Leyens said.
According to phone bills, the most minutes used in one month by a single employee is 1,600, Smith said. That’s more than 26 hours on the phone. Smith said he also goes over the larger bills to make sure all calls are for city business.
“Some guys run their departments out of their trucks, and they’re running all over town and have to call vendors,” Smith said.
The city department with the most cell phones is the police department, which has 20 phones including five used by the narcotics division. The fire department has 11 phones. Most departments have at least one.
The water, sewer and gas departments have also been added to the departments with cell phones at the recommendation of the Department of Homeland Security.
Department heads are responsible for keeping track of cell phone usage and determining which employees should have cell phones, Smith said.
The cost per minute for cell phones used by city employees will be about 8 cents per minute, down from 10 cents per minute under the existing contract with Suncom. Smith said the city is charged 29 cents per minute if they go over the allotted minutes, but that the city has never used all of the available time.
The city also uses some Nextel two-way radios in the mayor’s office, community service and inspection, which are not charged by the minute. The city radio system operates on a digital 800 mHz frequency, which also offers personal two-way communication with other radios in the system. Officials have cited the cost as the reason for not adding more hand-held units to that system.