The agreement calls for Sandy Springs to take the lead in procuring various elements of a new system, with each individual contract for equipment and services to be OK’d by each of the other signatories. In addition to Sandy Springs and Roswell, those cities are Johns Creek, Milton and Alpharetta.
Mountain Park will also be on the system but will not be contributing monetarily, City Administrator Kay Love said last week.
The cities in the new system will be buying Motorola radios, piggybacking onto an existing state contract that has already negotiated the pricing.
But before council could vote on the intergovernmental agreement, the area sales manager for Harris Corporation got up to ask that his company have an opportunity to bid on supplying the radios. “We and Motorola are the leading providers of these central communication systems for public safety,” said Russ Prindle, a Roswell resident.
In a review of the five cities’ needs, Prindle said it appeared that his company could save them up to 10 percent in cost. He said Georgia counties such as Henry, Floyd and the city of Rome realized similar savings with his company. “All we are asking is that you look at going to bid for your radio system equipment,” Prindle said.
But Mayor Jere Wood said he had to listen to technical experts in this decision. “We’re getting the recommendation from staff to sole source this product because they feel there is a difference in the products,” the mayor said. “The other cities have all concurred. I am not confident in second guessing the decision of someone I trust and who has a lot more experience in what they need.”
Roswell Police Capt. Ed Sweeney, who is the city’s representative on the five cities’ technology committee, said Harris has too few emergency radio systems up and running to adequately judge the equipment and its effectiveness, while Motorola has many such systems already installed. “Our review was more technical than contractual,” he said. Sweeney also said buying radios that are different from what surrounding jurisdictions are using would make it very difficult to have seamless communications operations, he added. Love told council that if the intergovernmental agreement was approved, in all likelihood the contract would not be bid out.
“Motorola is what this agreement contemplates to move forward with the system design,” she said. Roswell’s capital contribution to the new system is estimated to be $4.2 million.
These proprietary trunking systems are a huge money pit, and taxpayers end up getting taken to the cleaners and the agencies never get what they pay for. For example, in the Atlanta metro, we have 10 non-interconnected 800MHz systems, and to this day, there is no inter-system roaming between them, meaning an Atlanta officer who travels to Gwinnett county once outside the range of the Atlanta system, his radio will not automatically change to a Gwinnett owned site and be able to talk back. This was promised by a certain vendor for over 20 years, and various political and technical reasons are always cited as to why it has yet to happen.
It's mainly because there is no metro wide authority who runs all the systems. Instead it's all seperate little kingdoms where everyone creates walled gardens. Some of those systems, such as the ones in Gwinnett and Walton counties, use proprietary encryption that prevents other vendors' subscriber radios from accessing the network. So much for P25 being an "open standard".
Truth is we had more interagency interoperability and lower cost voice communications when these agencies were on VHF and UHF analog systems. No, there were no "whiz bang" fancy radios with 1000 talkgroups, color screen displays and voice prompts. But what we did have was reliable voice radios with everyone else's channels programmed right in, and could all talk to each other. There were no issues with radio vendor A not being compatible with radio vendor B. So long as the frequencies and tones were the same, it just worked. And worked well.
Maybe we should have stopped listening to those vendors long ago. We'd be about $500 million dollars richer (collectively speaking) and have something we don't have now: radios that actually work and we would all be able to talk to each other on scenes.
Roswell is making a huge mistake IMO. Another disparate proprietary radio network is NOT the answer, and they will find, as many others have, the true cost paid will be much higher than anticipated. Promises of performance and features working will get broken, and excuses will flow from the vendor's lips like hurricane Sandy washed away the Jersey shore.
and the taxpayers will once again, waste money and taxes will go up to compensate for it.
and 5-7 years from now, we'll be told we need to buy the next proprietary whiz-bang radio system as this one will "no longer be supported" and have to go through it all over again.
Things were so much simpler in the past, weren't they?
You mentioned there are ten non-interconnected 800 MHz radio systems in the Atlanta metro area and the reason radios on these different radio systems cannot roam because there isn't a metro wide authority to oversee the various systems. I personally do not believe a metro wide "authority" is needed to make this happen because when you mention "authority" I think of another layer of government that we do not need (like MARTA). The various governments need to simply appoint someone they already have on staff, preferably their radio system manager, to serve on a metro wide radio system oversight committee. This committee would manage two-way radio equipment and systems in the metro area by making sure each city and county remain up to date on technology by drafting Requests for Proposals, receive competitive bids, would seek out funding sources for each city and county, plus make sure no city or county uses any technology, feature or function that is proprietary. Again, the word "authority" scares me, so please stay away from this one.
Regarding interoperability between users in the 800 MHz frequency band, the FCC allocated five mutual aid channels in this part of the spectrum (named 8CALL and 8TAC 91 through 8TAC 94) for users on the different systems to communicate with each other during join operations. The Area 7 All Hazards Council Communications Subcommittee obtained grant funding several years ago and built out a metro wide 8TAC simulcast radio system for agencies in the nine county metro area to use during mutual aid situations, but it is very rarely used, if ever. This is because agencies have cross programmed radios to function on more than one of the other ten 800 MHz trunked radio systems in the metro area.
In today's day and time of cities and counties not wanting to commit to long term technological or other types of agreements because they are not sure if they can afford it I can understand why the cities in North Fulton County do not want to go in with Fulton County, Cobb County, DeKalb County, Forsyth County or the City of Atlanta by expanding the systems owned by these governments to give them the radio coverage they need, plus the annual reoccurring costs to do so. I think if the cities in north Fulton County want to take that huge step by building out their own system then so be it. They are the ones who will have to live with the decision and the taxpayers will bare the costs, but they need to do the right thing and put the system out for competitive bid. I know most, if not all, of the cities in north Fulton already have Motorola 800 MHz mobile and portable radios that are P25 capable, but that doesn't mean they have to purchase Motorola P25 infrastructure. They should at least issue an RFP for 700 MHz and 800 MHz P25 infrastructure from the various vendors to see what their options are. The taxpayers should demand it!
The cities' refusal to work with Fulton county to overhaul the analog system is telling. One has to wonder if this is because the county, unlike Roswell and the other players in the URS are considering other vendors for their upgrade.
Det. Sweeney doesn't know what he is talking about. Harris is a large corporation that has more Federal and US Military communications equipment contracts than Motorola Solutions could ever dream of. And no I don't work for them. But if he ever stepped foot onto a US military installation, you won't see any Motorola radios these days, but you will see Harris and EF Johnson.
Both of these vendors and a third, Cassidian (EADS North America) have sold hundreds of similar systems to governments around the country and the world, and have done so for less than Motorola Solutions. A true honest RFP process means competition which means lower cost to taxpayers.
The state law allowing for governments to side-step the open bid process needs to be stricken. It's an invitation for us to overpay and it hurts other vendors who are qualified. And we all end up paying more for it in the end. Every time.