Rathdrum approves new police evidence outbuilding

The smoking gun may just end up in new police evidence outbuilding in Rathdrum after all four members of the Rathdrum City Council authorized Mayor John Hodgkins to sign a contract with Port A Cover to build it.

Rathdrum reached out to three contractors, with Port A Cover winning the bid at $241,840, according to Rathdrum City Administrator Leon Duce. 

The building will be a 3,000-square-foot steel structure placed on an existing concrete slab at the new city hall campus.

“This is going to be for things like bikes we have to store and other large evidence items,” Rathdrum Police Chief Daniel Haley said. “Most of our evidence, the higher value (items), will still be inside our evidence room. But this is for those longer-term things that we need to store.”

Rathdrum will also be using the new building as an off-site area for server backups, Duce said.

Idaho Code §9-328 states that records must have periodic data backups for off-site storage. The purpose of the off-site backup is to ensure that if a fire or other disaster destroys where records are kept, the city would still have access to those records. 

Duce said that if records were uploaded to a cloud-based server, it could take weeks to download the information and restore records.

“Having an off-site backup that can be connected to our system has a speedier recovery process,” Duce said. “We also have an off-site backup in my home where I am connected to the server. Every night it does a backup of our system there as well. That will be replaced by this one once it's built and constructed.”

The agreement calls for the outbuilding to be completed by Feb. 5.