With nearly $4.5 million in state and federal grants earmarked for construction of a new Lake County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), ideas of how large a facility is needed and what may be included in the building are beginning to take shape.

An EOC is the physical location where Lake County comes together during an emergency to coordinate response & recovery actions and resources. The EOC is not an incident command post; rather, it is the operations center where coordination and management decisions are facilitated.

The Lake County EOC is currently located in the Lake County Administration Building, and during times of need, it brings together key agencies in one room to facilitate sheltering of evacuees, search & rescue, law enforcement, debris removal and other emergency activities. During the Groundhog Day Tornadoes in February 2007, more than five dozen staffers jammed into a makeshift training room working around the clock for several weeks.

Combined with the activations for the 2004 hurricanes and several other incidents in the past several years, such as tropical storms and wildfires, it has become apparent to officials that a larger, more secure and permanent facility is required.

?We?re probably the only emergency operations center in the country with skylights,? said Jerry Smith, Director of the Lake County Emergency Management Division. ?In 2004, these did leak. They have made some renovations to them since then, but it is still a concern. If those were to break, it would cause a disruption in service.?

The Lake County Board of County Commissioners approved at a meeting in March to move forward with the programming phase of the EOC project at the current site of the Judicial Center parking lot.

?The idea is to have the EOC being built at the same time as the Judicial Center expansion, so there will be two buildings being built on the same site,? said Kristian Swenson, Interim Director of the Lake County Department of Facilities Development & Management.

The Judicial Center expansion is expected to begin in June, and EOC construction could follow later, but the goal is to have both buildings finished at the same time in 2012. First, the idea of the proposed EOC facility must be refined with a firm cost estimate.

?The programming phase includes a needs assessment and it helps to figure out how much space is needed and what are all the items that need to go in the facility,? Swenson said. ?From the programming phase, a cost can be established of how much it would be to construct the proposed facility.?