Monitoring America to build back-up facility

TULSA, Okla.—Monitoring America Alarm Co-op president Ron Wies said construction of the third-party central station's redundant facility in nearby Owasso, Okla., may start next month.

“We purchased a piece of property [in Owasso] maybe six or seven years ago, with the idea that that's where we were going to put our back-up site.” Wies told Security Systems News. “The co-op finally made the decision last year that we were going to move forward and build our site and hopefully have it open by December this year.”

The company's main facility, located here, is 3,000 square feet. The back-up site will be about 3,200 square feet, he said. Wies said that any delays in construction and planning could push the opening of the new facility to early next year.

The property in Owasso is “close enough to our facility that our dispatchers and our people can easily get there. … We have some [operators] that live in Owasso,” Wies said. “We wanted it to protect ourselves in the event of being hit by a tornado, which is by far the biggest natural disaster that we can have that occurs here.”

Owasso is about 15 miles northeast of Tulsa. Due to storm patterns in the area for past tornadoes, Wies said the company is “very confident that our back-up site is located in a position [where] it is outrageously unlikely that we're ever going to have a single tornado that's going to hit us [in both sites],” he said.

Founded in 1989, Monitoring America is a co-op; each dealer with Monitoring America is a part-owner. “We're the only third party central station in the country that pays a dividend back to its customers at the end of the year,” Wies said.

“Each member owns one share of stock and has one vote. There is not a majority stock holder,” he said. “That makes everybody equal across the board; it doesn't matter how many accounts they have, it doesn't matter what their company's size is.”

Monitoring America Alarm Co-op monitors about 36,000 accounts from 150 dealers. Wies said that the company has accounts “coast to coast, in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.”