Glasgow Daily Times, Glasgow, KY

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June 25, 2009

Departments still working toward radio improvements

By AMBER DILLEY

GLASGOW — Departments in Barren County are still trying to work through the upcoming mandated radio system upgrade.

During a building and property committee meeting, county magistrates spoke with a group about two bids they received to update the system.

The county received a bid from Motorola for $384,000 and one from Kidd Communications for $368,000.

“The Motorola one has some features built into it that would actually cause some problems for us down the road,” said Shannon White, county code enforcement officer. “The system they have is what we call an Astro system, which means that everybody that uses that would eventually have to carry a Motorola radio. The equipment they’ve proposed is the same, though.”

The plan is to use money from the fire hydrant fund, which is about $44,000 annually, to make the payments on the system.

The state is mandating a system upgrade for all radio systems.

“It will cause some problems getting there, but it’s also got a lot of improvements for us,” White said. “We’ve got eight departments working off of one repeater in the whole county. This new system will have one big repeater and five ‘subrepeaters’ around it. It will add coverage to the people out in the field and help get our voice out. We can’t get out on hand-helds in a lot of places right now.”

This upgrade will switch systems to narrow band with a possibility of updating to digital sometime in the future.

“We don’t know when that (digital) will happen, but the subs that we asked for from both of these companies are upgradeable to digital,” White said.

“We’ve got about a year and half to do this, but we wanted to get started early,” said Larry Bragg, Austin-Tracy VFD chief. “There’s a number of things it brings to the table as far as improvements. I know in our area, we’ve got some dead places. This should take care of any communication problems we have out in the county. We’re looking forward to that part of it.”

Magistrate Howard Bowman Jr. asked if taking money from the fire hydrant fund to pay for the new repeaters would be OK.

“You can never have enough hydrants, but we’ve got them on every line we can put them on,” Bragg said.

For the new towers, the county fire chiefs association would have to lease the land and then could lease space on the tower for the sheriff’s office and the road department.

White said earlier, when the sheriff’s office received a grant to help pay for the equipment, the fire chiefs asked the state if they were included, but they were not.

Bragg suggested that the road department’s portion of the equipment be included in the payments, which will add $9,000 to the bill.

The magistrates will bring the suggestion of taking Kidd Communications’ bid with the addition of the road department price to the next fiscal court meeting.

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