Fire in the city?

FREEPORT, N.Y. - Responsiveness to the unique needs of city agencies helped New York Merchant’s Protective Company score a five-year $1.5 million fire alarm monitoring and service contract to the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services, said NYMPC president Wayne Wahrsager. “We’re the get-it-done people,” Wahrsager said. “We get the projects finished, completed, and signed off on. That’s why they keep coming back to us.” Wahrsager announced the contract on March 1. NYMPC, based here, installs, services and monitors security and fire systems for more than 70,000 locations across the country. Its New York City client list includes City Hall, all of the (five) borough city halls, all the courthouses in the city, the Board of Education and several social services agencies. “We are the largest single contractor for fire and security to the city agencies,” he said. This contract involves 50 buildings in New York. “The contract was awarded on Feb. 25, with a start date of March 1,” Wahrsager said. “It’s short notice, but we’re used to it.” “Every one of the buildings had to have fire monitoring and transmission equipment installed,” he explained. “All done,” he said on March 1. “We were able to accomplish 10 buildings a day.” “We basically tailor our service and response to the needs of the city,” he said. “We’ve got a staff of 30 service technicians that are at the beck-and-call of the city.” Most of his competitors have two- or three-day backlog on service calls, he claimed. “We can respond to any situation in the city in an hour, hour-and-a-half, 24/7, holidays and weekends.” NYMPC “works around the tight schedule of citylife. We get stuff accomplished after hours. In the schools we come in after students are out for the day.” Normally a customer would have to “pay exorbitant amounts of money” for this kind of service, Wahrsager posited. NYMPC does not charge extra, Wahrsager said, because of “the size of our company and our infrastructure, we can accommodate the eccentricities of the city, do it in a cost-effective way, so the city gets the work done and we make money.” SSN