Phone/Internet costing 10 times Dunwoody’s estimate

Dunwoody will pay 10 times more than it anticipated for its phone and Internet service — the latest underestimate in its budgeting as Georgia’s newest city.

The city’s inaugural budget calls for $27,000 to be spent on communications at its new city hall. On Monday, though, the City Council OK’d a $228,000 deal for phone and Internet service, plus monthly charges of $8,800 for maintenance and $1,500 for service.

Councilman Danny Ross dissented, and several council members said they would hold their nose and approve the deal, largely to meet an April 1 deadline for the city’s police force to hit the streets.

“This is what we recommend to have voice and data ready by March 15 for the police department,” Manager Warren Hutmacher told the council. “It is certainly something we should have anticipated a month or two ago and just didn’t. It was an error on our part.”

It’s not the first miscalculation for the new city, now just a month old. Advocates for incorporation first said the city would have an $18 million budget and fully staffed police department for only $2 million, all without raising taxes.

Late last year, when the city adopted its startup budget, the police department cost $5.7 million in just a $14.4 million budget.

Hutmacher and the city’s new IT manager recommended the phone/Internet contract last week, to a skeptical council. The city waited a week to seek bids, though only one was sent.

That deal was about $3,000 less but also did not include a year of free engineering support, Hutmacher said.

The approved contract also includes a five-year financing plan, at 3.25 percent interest. The first year’s payment will be $36,000, with $48,000 due in 2010.

The city will receive an estimated $8,000 from the sale of its current phones, though Hutmacher has recommended spending money left over in the lease account for the new city hall on Perimeter Center East to cover the $9,000 difference this year.

It will be one of several budget adjustments that Hutmacher has said will need to be done as the city gets established.