Works are progressing on the Frederick County Goverment office facility in Maryland, which features a data center.
The project involves converting the Prospect Center on Himes Avenue in Frederick. The building was purchased by the county in 2021 for $20 million and will house several government agencies, a 911 center, a data center, and a micro-grid. The Prospect Center is a 209,000 sq ft (19,415 sqm) building and has previously been used by the council as a mass Covid-19 vaccination site.
In total, the county is putting $30 million towards retrofitting the facility.
So far, the roof, fire alarms, and sprinkler systems have been replaced and the process of assigning building areas to different purposes has been completed. According to County Government CFO Dan Lewis, designs for the data center are still underway.
"We are also designing the 911 call center, the data center that would be part of that facility, and the micro-grid,” said Lewis. “There’s special requirements for those specific aspects and they’re being done separately because of those requirements that are tied to that.”
According to Lewis, the microgrid will account for around 72 percent of the facility's power usage. The microgrid is being funded partially through the fiscal year 2022 CIP ($1.4m) and is pending funding from Homeland Security Appropriations and State funding. Additionally, they are considering financing methods through PPAs.
Frederick County announced in August 2023 that it would be deploying a new 911 system, "Convey911," which can manage language interpretation on phone calls or in text conversations with automatic detection of different languages. Convey911 is a web-based platform that can be run on the cloud or on-premise - it is unclear whether this will be deployed in the 911 data center built at the facility.
It is currently expected that the County Government office building will be ready for employees to use the facility in the next 18 months to two years. Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates are the architects for the development.
