The City of Bremerton plans to spend about $50,000 of its water department’s money to install antennas for use by the utility and at least four other city agencies.

The antennas, which will sit atop a $75,000 tower facility built in February, are expected to serve the water department, police, fire, public works and the emergency operations center. Valmont Industries won the contract to do the work for $47,798.12.

The total bill for the tower and antenna work is being paid for with money from the city’s 2012 water fund at the same time the city is conducting a utilities rate study seeking to raise rates.

Two new antennas will be installed and used by the water department at a cost of $12,000. The other city departments using the new tower won’t contribute to the relocation costs of their existing antennas which sit on the Oyster Bay Public Works and Utilities Facility.

“The driving issue is that the water resources division is moving from the Olympus Drive facility to the Oyster Bay facility,” said city engineer Tom Knuckey, by way of explaining why the water fund is being used to pay for all the work.

“This is just a safety measure – a measure that is for the water department,” said Bremerton Mayor Patty Lent. “If we can utilize anything else with that, we’re going to take advantage of that.”

Knuckey said that in addition to the relocation of the city’s ultraviolet water treatment facility, officials also had to move the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system. The SCADA system allows for remote operation of pump stations, monitors reservoir elevations, tracks pH levels and much more.

“SCADA allows them to actively monitor the quantity and quality of the water, basically all of the operations of the system, remotely,” Knuckey said.

Knuckey emphasized that between the move, the tower and antennas, the water department will be better prepared to handle an emergency.

“Having their staff in East Bremerton, when most of their facilities are in West Bremerton, does cause some problems when we have emergencies and they need to be able to get to their facilities in an emergency,” Knuckey said.

The higher tower, of course, will also improve communication capabilities for the other users. Public Works and Utilities will have one antenna on the tower as will the police and fire departments. In addition, one antenna will allow for communication with the Washington State Emergency Management Division and three antennas will allow for Kitsap County Alternate Communication System (amateur radio) in support of the city’s emergency operations center.