The Champaign City Council passed resolutions Tuesday to purchase a digital fingerprinting system for the city’s police department and accept $24,000 in reimbursement for training members of Champaign’s police and fire departments to contain weapons of mass destruction.

The reimbursement money repaid the department for training that allowed certain officers and firemen to become part of one of the state’s Regional Containment Teams. Those teams are organized by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and are trained to contain the hazardous results of nuclear weapons, biological attacks and similar weapons, Champaign Police Chief R.T. Finney said.

“It’s so (the officers) will be ready to work in a hazardous environment,” Finney said. “It’s a shared thing nationally, so in case something happens it allows other areas to draw from (Illinois’ teams).”

Earlier this year, members of the Regional Containment Team, including Champaign police officers, were sent to Louisiana to assist in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In addition to the live action, officers on the team have been training one day per month and attended “live agent training” in Anniston, Ala., according to a report by City Manager Steven Carter.

The reimbursement was part of a busy night for the Champaign Police Department, which will also receive a $34,240 AFIX Tracker fingerprint identification system. The new system, which Champaign will share with Urbana and the University, will be used to store the fingerprints of every arrested person in the county, Finney said.

“This is no longer an ink and paper system – it’s all digital,” Finney said. “It’s much quicker, and you can go through thousands of prints in short order.”

The FBI already has an electronic database, Finney said, but requests to the bureau often take a long time to complete. Champaign officers often were forced to go through their local system and eyeball each set of prints to identify a crook.

The AFIX Tracker system will be purchased with funds from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Grant and will go along with an Identix Live Scan 3800 system that digitally collects prints from arrested criminals. Together, the two fingerprinting devices will cost over $95,000 dollars, but none of the expenses will come out of the city’s coffers.

The council also voted to extend severance pay for terminated department heads to up to six months. Currently, department heads are paid for only three months after losing their jobs. Employees only receive severance pay if they were terminated without cause, councilwoman Kathy Ennen (at-large) said.

Tuesday’s meeting took place without Mayor Gerald Schweighart, who could not be reached for comment. Deputy Mayor and district 2 councilman Michael La Due conducted the meeting in Schweighart’s place.