New county emergency radio system would be expected to last at least 30 years
By Aaron Gifford
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York)
Copyright 2006 Post-Standard
All Rights Reserved
The Madison County Board of Supervisors has agreed to borrow up to $17 million to upgrade the county’s faulty emergency radio communications system.
The board approved a bonding resolution earlier this month that would pay to replace four communications towers and build five new ones. The system would be expected to last at least 30 years. County Treasurer Harold Landers says he thinks the bonds could be paid off within a decade.
“This is the largest project in the history of Madison County,” he said.
In recent years, local police and firefighters have complained that the existing towers often fail to transmit their radio signals. The county system uses a microwave signal to activate fire station alarms and firefighters’ pagers after 911 dispatchers send a radio alert.
Some of the equipment in the county’s three towers is more than 30 years old. Replacement parts were phased out years ago, and county Fire Coordinator Joe DeFrancisco has relied on “bastardized” parts that other counties junked when they replaced their towers.
County police agencies and ambulances use VHF radio frequency, and the fire departments use the obsolete low-band frequencies, which are no longer supported by radio manufacturers. The Wampsville console that communicates with the towers likely would be replaced with UHF, giving dispatchers and emergency crews more radio channels and eliminating the likelihood that some channels will have to be restricted to emergency traffic only, which is often the case now.
“The problem is, we don’t have enough bandwidth,” DeFrancisco said, noting that the county’s 23 fire departments now share two channels; UHF would give them four or five channels.
The county dispatch center typically receives more than 2,000 emergency calls a month. Clear voice communications and timely emergency alert signals are paramount to public safety in rural communities that rely on volunteer firefighters and ambulance crews.
“South of Route 20 is not friendly to radio signals,” said county Emergency-911 Communications Center Director Paul Hartnett. “We want a continuous loop around the county.”
By spring, county supervisors expect to hire a consultant to oversee the project. The towers’ installation, county officials estimate, should be finished before 2009.
“Once you have the land and you select the radio system, the actual construction doesn’t take long at all,” Hartnett said. “It’s not unusual for a whole new system to be up and running in a year.”
County officials haven’t decided on the locations for the new towers, though Hartnett said they could be built onto existing cell phone towers.
The bond would provide $200,000 toward the purchase of land for new towers. The county has about $2 million in cash to start the upgrades and likely would avoid drawing any money and interest charges from that $17 million bond allotment until its existing debts are paid off in 2010, Landers said.