Dakota County hired Wold to help plan and design a new Dakota Communications Center (DCC) that would consolidate the 911 dispatch operations of 11 cities and the County into a centralized location operating as a joint power.
Wold took on the challenge of designing a technically challenging facility and using the design process as a vehicle for the newly created Joint Powers entity to merge and define a new cultural identity. Wold worked with the Dakota County Core Planning Group to develop the project’s guiding principles that covered facility solutions and operational objectives. The new facility is located at the County’s Empire Transportation Facility campus to allow it to be in close proximity to a major radio communications tower and other county resources but place the facility remote enough to mitigate threats posed by denser populated area or collocation with major government facilities. The structure contains a central dispatch at the core with administration support and state-of-the-art data/communications room and mechanical/electrical rooms at the perimeter. Protected windows allowing views out and daylight in, a break room, and locker rooms are amenities to ease the stress conveyed to dispatch staff during every shift to keep them going. Redundancies designed into the mechanical and electrical systems and the exterior envelope ensure that the building will remain in support of dispatching operations.