City Council considers new rotating tornado siren for DPW site

Everyone on the Belleville City Council agrees the old tornado siren on the city hall roof needs to be replaced, but Mayor Ken Voigt wants to see if a grant could be found to cover this.
The item was not voted on at Monday’s meeting as requested by city manager Jason Smith. He had asked a new siren to be purchased from Westshore Services at a cost of $27,900. Smith said he would report back at the July 1 meeting on available grants.
He reported that when the roof at city hall was repaired, the wiring for the present siren was damaged.
“While we were able to repair the siren, it did signal some glaring weaknesses with our system,” he reported. “The siren itself is a Cold-War era relic that is operated manually, meaning someone must be on-site to set it off. In instances where seconds count, such as severe weather, this is a woefully inefficient system.”
He said Westshore Services is the lone servicer of Federal Signal sirens in the state of Michigan and has installed sirens in Sumpter and Van Buren townships. He said the system quoted for the city is like those that have been installed around the tri-community area.
The new signal would be an electro-mechanical rotating signal with battery backup and radio relay, meaning that VBT dispatch would be able to set it off with the other signals around the area, thus eliminating the need for an officer to rush back to the station to manually trigger the report, Smith said.
He said the siren would be able to reach all of the city, except the far part of Harbour Pointe subdivision, but another siren overlaps that area.
Mayor Voigt said he thinks the siren has been there longer than the Cold War and may have been there in the 1940s during World War II.
Smith said the siren would be installed at the DPW garage area since there are possible other plans for city hall.