The Iberia Parish E-911 Board of Commissioners voted Wednesday morning to accept the low bid for construction of a new facility at the Acadiana Regional Airport to house the district’s communication and dispatching operation.

The low bid, received from M.D. Descant Construction of Bunkie, came in $147,000 over the original budget, but Director Prescott Marshall said that was still far better than the other bids received.

“We can probably make up that amount,” Marshall said. “This bid is probably $600,000 or $700,000  lower than the next higher bid we received.”

The cost for the new structure, which will be built to survive Category 5-strength hurricane winds, will be just under $5 million, Marshall said, with a large portion of that amount coming from federal and state grants.

“Right now, there is not a place in the parish that is built to survive that sort of storm,” Marshall said. “This will give us a secure facility that we know will be able to stay online no matter how bad the storm may be.”

The E-911 staff are now evaluating vendors for the components of the communication systems that will be installed in the new facility. The current computer-aided dispatch system is only five years old, so it will be moved to district’s new home. Its radio and telephony systems, however, will be new.

“The current telephony system is about 12 years old,” Marshall said. “I’m not sure how old that is in technology years, but we can’t be sure it would make the move to the new building. Once you turn it off and try to move it, you can’t be sure all of the soldered connections will stay intact.”

Three vendors — Avtex Solutions, C-TRON and Motorola — are currently engaged in talks to provide a new system. Board members said they hope to schedule demos for the three vendors’ products by the end of the year.

Marshall said the construction phase is expected to take approximately 14 months, with another 10 months to a year of system installation, integration and testing. If all goes well, he said he expects to be operating from the new facility by 2021.