By Steven Elbow, The Capital Times, originally posted Aug. 11, 2010

Madison, Wis. — In the basement of the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, four pallets loaded with radios, still in their boxes, are taking up floor space. They were part of a larger stockpile, some of which were put in use. But when County Board members floated a plan last month to expand Madison’s emergency radio system countywide, sheriff’s officials stopped handing them out.

“We have these kind of in a holding pattern right now,” says Chief Deputy Ron Boylan.

The problem is that the radios the Sheriff’s Office bought work on VHF frequencies. They won’t work with the city’s 800 megahertz system. And scrapping the already-purchased radios will cost the county a bundle. While Motorola, the company that sold the radios to the Sheriff’s Office, has agreed to buy back the unused radios, the county would have to shoulder the cost of the radios that were already put in use and buy more-expensive 800 megahertz radios to replace them.

In addition, the county would have to pay back a $268,000 federal grant, administered by the state, that applies to the purchase of VHF radios. Because the state is encouraging VHF systems, the grants are not available for 800 megahertz radios.

“We’re talking somewhere in the range of … $2 million” in Sheriff’s Office costs if the county adopts the 800 megahertz plan, says Boylan, who also chairs the county 911 Communications Center Board.

And the Sheriff’s Office isn’t alone. Police, fire and emergency medical services (EMS) agencies throughout the county purchased VHF radios to work with the proposed $30 million DaneCom system, which was scrapped after a political squabble over who would pay for $1.5 million in annual operating costs. Many of those radios were purchased with federal grants handed out by the state Office of Justice Assistance, more than $1 million worth. And since those grants were matching funds, and some agencies made purchases for which they got no state money at all, they represent only a fraction of the radios purchased in Dane County.

Tami Jackson, a spokeswoman for the state Office of Justice Assistance, said agencies that don’t use radios purchased with state grants will have to pay back the grants.

The grants are not available for 800 megahertz radios because VHF is the primary frequency spectrum for the state’s new WisCom emergency radio system.

In addition, Stoughton Fire Chief Marty Lamers says several Dane County fire departments applied for, and got, a $1 million federal Department of Homeland Security grant to buy more radios. But they wrote the grant for DaneCom-compatible VHF radios. It’s no good for 800 megahertz radios. “That’s just sitting there, waiting,” he says.

No one has tallied up exactly how many radios were purchased for the proposed DaneCom system, but it’s safe to say the cost is in the millions. And if agencies want to sign on to the proposed expansion of Madison’s 800 megahertz system, they have to spend the money all over again.

In the ongoing lose-lose that has come to define the county’s planned emergency radio upgrade, at least in the eyes of many agencies outside Madison, the proposal to move to an 800 megahertz system is one more hashmark in the loss column.

Other than the operating costs, the central feature of DaneCom that everybody could rally around was the concept of interoperability. It accommodated both VHF and 800 megahertz frequencies and was designed to allow everyone, from police to snowplow operators, to talk to one another. “When I look back five years at the Stoughton tornado, we had 53 different EMS and fire agencies come to Stoughton to help out,” says Lamers, who is president of the Dane County Fire Chief’s Association. “All but one of them, the city of Madison, were on VHF. And therein lies the problem.”Lamers says going to an 800 megahertz system would be a step backwards for interoperability in the county. It would initially include only law enforcement, leaving fire and EMS agencies unable to talk to police. For some agencies, whose jurisdictions span county lines or which have mutual aid agreements with agencies in other counties that use VHF, the 800 megahertz proposal gets even more complicated. “This thing is getting so convoluted I don’t even know where to start,” says town of Bristol Chairman Jerry Derr, who is president of the Dane County Towns Association.

Derr says that when he first heard about the Madison proposal, introduced by County Board Chairman Scott McDonell, it sounded good. But the more he thought about it, the less sense it made.

“It’s not compatible with the new state system, that’s VHF, our existing systems and the new radios we just bought are VHF, the State Patrol is VHF, Med Flight and all those things are VHF,” he says. “And I’m thinking, maybe 800 isn’t as good a thing as I thought it was.”But McDonell says local municipalities and agencies could have a system that would allow them to talk with other agencies if they want it. They would just have to buy new radios.

“That’s their personal choice not to have it be interoperable,” he says.

And he says it’s the county’s municipalities that created the problem in the first place by not signing on to a cost-sharing plan for the upkeep of DaneCom.

“That’s sort of why we’re where we’re at right now,” he says.

McDonell says he modeled his plan on Waukesha County’s upgrade, which took an incremental approach to getting emergency response agencies signed on to an interoperable system. Waukesha County launched its system nearly a decade ago and only recently got the last of its agencies on board.

McDonell’s plan carries a $25 million price tag, $5 million less than the proposed DaneCom system. But he says Madison, which would operate the system, would kick in $8 million, which would lower the cost to the county to $17 million. Madison, which balked at the DaneCom system because it would reduce the number of channels available to the city, benefits because the system is already in use by city police, fire and EMS agencies.

But the plan would clearly leave some municipalities holding the bag.

Middleton, where the emergency radio system was in dire need of an upgrade, recently spent about $250,000 on a new communications center, complete with VHS radios.

“We made a significant investment in the current system thinking we had the best guess as to where we were going to end up given all the planning that had gone into DaneCom for years,” says Capt. Noel Kakuske.

Asked what switching to an 800 megahertz system would entail, he says: “It would be very expensive.”Not only that. “It would isolate us from our fire department and EMS. We wouldn’t be able to talk to them.”One of the big advantages of 800 megahertz is that it has better building penetration, a plus in urban areas. It also is less prone to radio interference. But the radio waves don’t travel as far, so more towers would have to be built or rural areas will lose coverage.

It’s also more technologically advanced, says Boylan, and several states, including Minnesota and Michigan, have gone the 800 megahertz route. But those systems came at a cost. Jackson, from the Office of Justice Assistance, says Minnesota spent $200 million and Michigan $230 million on those systems. Wisconsin plans to spend only $22 million for the initial phase of WisCom, which should be completed by the end of this year. That’s because 70 percent of public safety radio users already work on VHF systems that are already in place, according to Jackson.

One thing it clear: Time is running out. Because of congestion on the airwaves, the Federal Communications Commission plans to reduce the range of frequencies available to public safety agencies, and it has given VHF radio users a deadline of Jan. 1, 2013, to narrow the band of frequencies they use, or “narrowband.”

To meet the deadline, Dane County has to do something soon.

A proposal from County Executive Kathleen Falk, different from McDonell’s, would simply narrowband the current system at a cost of $6.8 million.

That way, “we can meet federal requirements, keep all options on the table, and keep working toward agreeable solutions,” she wrote in a July 14 letter to County Board supervisors.

But the 800 megahertz proposal has generated a lot of board support. Twenty-one of the board’s 37 supervisors have signed on to a resolution to partner with Madison, the vast majority of those representing districts in the city. It’s unclear if the board will consider the option at its Aug. 19 meeting.

“This would be a great deal for the city of Madison,” says Stoughton’s Lamers. “It would be a super deal for them. But it doesn’t do much for us.”

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office is keeping four pallets of purchased emergency radios in their boxes until decisions are made about which radio system the county and other municipalities will use.

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