The current Motorola radio system is at "end of life,'' county officials have said. Radio failures have exacerbated problems with the county's emergency dispatch system, a relatively new regional effort that call-takers and dispatchers have struggled to master.
The need for a new radio system has been known for years. The outcry to replace it has grown louder. Police and fire chiefs across Broward have complained the outages are dangerous, severing communications between dispatchers and first responders at crime and accident scenes.
In a letter last summer to Broward County Administrator Bertha Henry, the Broward County Chiefs of Police Association complained about outages and static on the radios and said some police departments had to switch to two-person patrols and perform a roll call every hour.
By unanimous vote Tuesday, county commissioners agreed to seek out vendors capable of building a new system, at an estimated $45 million price tag. The system is expected to be in place in 2018, said Brett Bayag, acting director of the Office of Regional Communications and Technology.
"It certainly is a positive thing,'' said Bayag. "... It's going to be an improvement in performance and backup capability.''
A county consultant, Mission Critical Partners, recently examined the radio system and found many weaknesses. The handheld radios are poorly maintained in some cases; there are dead zones in high-rise buildings and elsewhere; there's no back-up system in the event of a major failure; and there are challenges maintaining the overall system because of its age.
More than 10,000 public safety radios are used on the system. Only Coral Springs, Plantation, Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale have their own radio systems.
Its importance is so great to the safety of first responders and to the dispatch system in general that Fort Lauderdale City Manager Lee Feldman said he was losing sleep worrying about it. His city decided last year to spend $5 million to maintain its own radios for another five years, he said. Commissioners there were not willing to gamble on the county achieving its 2018 radio replacement goal.
In a letter to fire and police chiefs last month, County Administrator Bertha Henry said the new, modern, digital radio system will have back-up capabilities, will help emergency responders communicate inside high-rise buildings to the east, and across Alligator Alley to the west, and will be compatible with systems used by neighboring counties and state and federal agencies.
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©2016 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
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