Who will repair those radios if they malfunction is uncertain, however — the county’s go-to company for that job recently closed its doors.
The Calhoun County Commission on Thursday bought 80 new handheld radios for Sheriff’s deputies and 18 for their vehicles. The radios will be purchased from Motorola for $326,000, a 40 percent discount off the original price.
“We’ve got to have them anyway,” assistant county administrator Melissia Wood said after the commission’s Thursday morning work session.
“If you can get them 40 percent off,” Wood said — that’s a good deal.
With a lean budget for the current fiscal year that promised no new capital improvements, commissioners will still need to finance the purchase.
They’ll do so through Hancock Bank, which offered a 1.63 percent interest rate on the loan.
The new radios are deputies’ connection to backup — reliable operation is a matter of life or death for them, Chief Deputy Matt Wade said Thursday.
“We need to make sure those guys have the newest, most reliable equipment,” he said.
The old radios were purchased through the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program, Wade said.
A joint Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Army initiative, the program provided money to prepare Calhoun County’s first responders in the event of the accidental release of chemical weapons stored at Anniston Army Depot.
The replaced radios will be placed into a bank, Wade said, and made available to other county departments — road work crews and the like — in the event their radios malfunction.
When that happened in years past, the county looked to McCord Communications to repair them.
McCord was certified to sell, install and maintain Motorola radios, but ceased operating Nov. 6.
“I have no doubt there will be another service provider that moves in to take over their service area,” Calhoun County Emergency Management Agency director Jonathan Gaddy said Thursday.
Gaddy, who the commission recognized at its meeting for obtaining a master’s degree in homeland defense and security through FEMA, said he’d heard at least one Birmingham-area business was interested in scooping up McCord’s clients.
The commission on Thursday also awarded a contract for three vehicles for the Sheriff’s Office to Sunny King Ford, paying between $26,240 to $29,799 for each.
Commissioners had in October given the contract to Heflin’s Buster Miles Ford, but needed to rescind that contract after the dealership couldn’t deliver the vehicles at the prices it’d bid.
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