AUGUSTA — Phone service at the Kennebec County district attorney’s office has been interrupted since Monday, making it difficult for defense attorneys, police, defendants, witnesses and victims to make contact.
County Administrator Robert Devlin says the problem should be resolved on Monday.
In the meantime, District Attorney Maeghan Maloney suggested attorneys and defendants use email to contact the office.
“The lack of phone service has been extremely frustrating, and I apologize to all who have been inconvenienced,” Maloney said on Wednesday.
One defense attorney, Kevin Sullivan, hoping to get the district attorney to agree to a continuance in a case, didn’t get an answer to repeated phone calls, so he walked the paperwork over to the office in the Kennebec County Courthouse from the Capital Judicial Center next door and noted that on his request to the judge.
On Wednesday, assistant district attorneys were overheard apologizing to defense counsel who said they were unable to call them about cases.
“We put in a new phone system, and it’s linked into our existing phone system that we put into the Hill House (county government offices) and the jail a couple years ago,” Devlin said. “It’s an Internet-based system now. The number of lines serving those two places was fine. Now that we’ve added these new phones, it got overloaded.”
Devlin said the computer work is to be done by BCN Telecom, a New Jersey firm that has provided Internet phone services to the county for years.
Devlin said Fairpoint Communications completed its work as scheduled on Monday and he and David Hawke, the county’s director of information technology, have been trying to push to get the changeover sooner from Telecom.
The county is installing the new phones as part of its renovations to the historic county courthouse. The state courts moved to the adjacent Capital Judicial Center on March 2, and the county began shifting some offices as it does work in its building.
“We knew this was going to be a problem,” Devlin said. “The phone system at the DA’s office was separate from the rest of the county.”
Betty Adams — 621-5631
Twitter: @betadams
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