Discuss, consider and take appropriate action on approving the Memorandum of Understanding between the City of Leander and Williamson County for a temporary gate solution.

This project was brought upon by two master planned communities Crystal Falls Home Owners Association (affected lots of Grand Mesa) & Travisso LTD.  These two subdivisions in 2014 drafted a MOU with regards to a joint gate maintenance agreement. The gate which was constructed by Travisso, and was constructed without gate keypad or auto-open functionality. The gate was intended for Emergency Services vehicles to be allowed via secure manual actuations.  Once the gate was completed ownership was intended to be transferred to Home Owners Association.

     Between 2014 and 2017 there has been an ongoing legal action between the City of Leander and the Crystal Falls Home Owners Association with regards to access for all Public Safety vehicles.  It is the County’s understanding that neither the Association or its members would concede to standard access’s methods that traditionally allows Emergency Services to gain access to or through the gated communities.  With this said a temporary solution has been reached between the City of Leander and the Association.  The project proposed utilizes a Public Safety radio and the call alert feature accessible via the Leander PD dispatch console to allow for paging tones to be sent to control gate opening and closure.  RCS and Leander met with regards to this solution and the City of Leander and Williamson County RCS both agreed that a MOU clarifying that this solution is temporary until a better solution can be delivered and agreed upon by all parties would be the best course of action.

   Leander is very much aware of the County’s concerns with setting this type of precedence.  The systems themselves do have talk group limitations and we have been quite conservative when creating additional ones for existing agencies, while we harbor and save our reserve ones for new customers coming onto the system like the ISDs and Hospitals.  Offering Public safety talk-groups to open and close private communities seems a bit of an overkill.  If every gated community places themselves in this same position of deserving a private level of entry for public safety, this could be very problematic.  At the time of negotiations a CAD report was pulled county wide to determine the number of gated communities within our boundaries, this report went well into the hundreds.   The City of Leander will be required to provide a yearly status as to the solution alternatives made available as technology allots for a change from the current designed radio solution platform.