Lake County Jail

Net2 Provides Reliable, Cost-Effective Security Solution for Ohio Detention Facility

Lake County Jail, in Painesville, Ohio. was originally built in 1859. In the late 1980s the Ohio Administrative Code was updated to include the “Minimum Standards for Jails in Ohio”, which the jail could not meet without great expense. The jail was rebuilt to meet the new standards and in 1990 the new Lake County Adult Detention Facility was opened.

Requirement

The existing access control solution installed at the detention facility was obsolete and needed to be replaced with an updated system. It was important to find a system with diversified architecture (single door system: one controller for one door).

Paul Stefanko, Lake County Telecommunications Director, said: “We chose Paxton because of its versatility, and it worked out really well. Distributed processing is really beneficial to us, the single door architecture means we only lose one door if a particular system fails, which is really important in matters of public safety.”

 

There is no maintenance cost with Paxton, no licensing fees. You buy it upfront and there are no ongoing costs, other than a rare equipment failure, which was beneficial to us and incredibly cost effective. Cost of ownership was very good.

– Paul Stefanko, Telecommunications Director, Lake County Jail

 

Solution

Paxton’s Net2 system is a user-friendly and flexible networked access control solution that offers centralized administration and control of sites with up to 1,000 doors and 50,000 users. It has exactly the features that Paul and his team were looking for – the single door controller architecture means there is no single point of failure.  If power to that door goes down, the rest of the site remains secure and doors will not unlock.

The decision was made to install the Net2 controllers without separate power supply units, as they can connect to an existing centralized power source backed up with batteries. This provided significant cost savings on site.

The Lake County team integrated their Net2 system with Axis CCTV cameras and Silent Knight burglar alarms to make complete site management via the Net2 software simple and efficient.

Paul went on to say: “There is no maintenance cost with Paxton, no licensing fees. You buy it upfront and there are no ongoing costs, other than a rare equipment failure, which was beneficial to us and incredibly cost effective. Cost of ownership was very good.”

Result

Staff at the detention facility now use their access cards as ID cards, as they can be printed with user information and staff photos with the Card Designer feature in the Net2 Pro software. The cards are also programmed to work with a number of the jail’s own systems, making the multi-use tokens incredible beneficial. The team confirm that their new system is easy to use, easy to program, and easy to maintain. Overall, they feel that it has been a really good experience for them.

“Paxton’s technical support team are very responsive” said Paul. “They’re good. It is always a challenge when you start using a new product. You can have the best product in the world, but it is useless without the proper support. That wasn’t a problem for us with Paxton and Net2.”

“When you deal with public safety you need to make sure the products you buy and maintain are reliable, and that you have a good level of support. That is what you get with Paxton, it was very refreshing. We will be using Paxton for a very long time. “

Since installing the Paxton Net2 access control system in the Lake County Jail, the Telecom department has expanded the system to include:

  • Administration building
  • Job and Family Services building
  • Emergency Operations Center
  • Courthouse
  • Probate
  • Buildings and Grounds building
  • Public Defender
  • All the Utility water plants and pump stations.

 

Type of site

  • Public sector – Detention facility

 

Location

  • Ohio, USA

 

Number of users/doors

  • 1,600 users
  • 300+ doors

 

Solution required

  • Updated access control system
  • Single door architecture
  • Flexibility to expand

 

Result

  • Multi-use access cards
  • Versatile and reliable system
  • Cost-effective solution

 

Paxton products used

  • P50 readers
  • P38 readers
  • Net2 Pro software
  • Net2 Pro controllers
  • Proximity Marine readers

 

Integrations

  • Axis CCTV cameras
  • Silent Knight burglar alarms