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ANALYSIS : Indian River County now has a little over 500 ESSX stations. ESSX is usually the service of choice when voice circuits are added because an ESSX station costs the County an average of less than $20 per station for a typical voice application as compared to $34.30 for a normal business line. In those locations where there is a large concentration of telephone usage (e.g. the County Administration Building, the Courthouse, the Sheriffs Office) it makes sense to install a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) or some other type of telephone system. In smaller offices (e.g. fire stations, branch Utility offices, etc.), it generally is more economical to install ESSX. With ESSX, the user gets not only the lowest cost dial tone available, but also PBX-like features such as call pickup, call forwarding, three-way calling, abbreviated dialing to other ESSX stations, etc. i If Indian River County agrees to a new 5-year contract for the CENTREX service, and makes no changes in deployment strategy, our monthly costs will increase from $ 12, 149. 83 to $ 12,629.92. If, however, we convert some of our existing regular business lines to CENTREX, we will actually reduce our monthly billing. One of the bonuses of the new CENTREX offering is the inclusion of up to 30 custom features at one low price rather than a charge for each feature that is added to a line under the ESSX contract. Another new offering is CENTREX CONTROL, a GUI (Graphical User interface) based program for customer control of feature deployment. With this package, Indian River County could do most of the programming of the lines and eliminate some of the service order charges that we generally incur throughout the year as we have to make changes to existing ESSX stations. This would greatly enhance our flexibility in customizing our communications network. Under CENTREX, many of the features that we would have liked but did not get because of the additional cost , such as CALLER-ID, will now be included. Indian River County only has ESSX service in the area served by BellSouth's Vero—Main Central Office. Although we could have instituted ESSX in the Sebastian, Beachland, and Fellsmere Central Offices, we did not have enough telephone stations to justify the cost. Under the current CENTREX offering, for a limited time. installation charges are waived for activation in these additional Central Offices, and it would now be economically advisable to initiate CENTREX in Sebastian, Beachland (Vero Beach Exchange on barrier island), and Fellsmere. BellSouth is also waiving 5 months of the common equipment charges for the Vero-Main conversion. Depending on the final deployment strategy, Indian River County could save as much as $2,000 per year based on current usage. There may be some regular business tines that we do not want to change to CENTREX; this would have to be determined departmentally. No other solution appears to warrant consideration since the circuit cost of all alternatives known to Staff are higher than CENTREX and would generally require large expenditures for new equipment. RECOMMENDATION : Staff recommends that the Board authorize the Chairman to sign the attached agreements for the provision of services from BellSouth under the CENTREX offering. Board Action would require the County' s Telecommunications Manager to work with the Departments under the Board and with the Constitutional Officers to take advantage of the new offering where practical. and define which custom services and lines will be included DECEMBER 5 , 2000g ' � � J Q 6 - 64 -