By Jessica Mathews / news@whmi.com


Old, outdated security equipment is being upgraded at Howell City Hall.

The City budgeted to replace the security camera server and door access control appliance at City Hall in the 2020-2021 fiscal year. At a recent meeting, City Council approved purchasing the door access control system upgrades and the DVR upgraded video surveillance system for a cost of $9,070.

The door access control appliance was installed six years ago and is currently running on an old operating system that is no longer supported. A memo states the access control software is also outdated and no longer supported. The security camera video server was replaced five years ago due to a hardware failure and it being past the systems “end of life”. It was replaced with a DVR appliance to store archive video data, however, the amount of that data that can be stored for a certain period of time has decreased to around seven days.

The memo stated that due to additional cameras and the increase in archive video data storage, a new DVR appliance with 6 Terabytes of space should give the city back at least 30 days of archive video storage from the 16 security cameras.

The City was said to have reached out to its current security company, Engineered Protections Systems, to upgrade the current solutions. It was determined the city will provide a computer for the new Access Control System and utilize the existing swipe cards, card readers, and electronic door hardware and wire. The hardware that controls the door strikes, networking, and power will be upgraded and the new software will be installed on the configured City computer by EPS.

The memo says the current Honeywell security camera DVR appliance archives under a terabyte of data. The new appliance will have an archive storage of six terabytes and EPS will reconfigure and integrate the current cameras to work with the new solution.