Jefferson County 911 Dispatch plans to spend about $5.4 million to buy at least 831 communication devices and related items for the emergency response agencies it serves.
“We will provide new hand-held radios to all police, fire and ambulance agencies we dispatch for,” 911 Dispatch Chief Travis Williams said. “We dispatch for 16 fire, five ambulance and six police agencies and for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The new radios will replace radios we first started providing in 2012.
“The technology changes. The radios we bought in 2012-2013 are approaching end-of-life. You can’t get the parts to repair them anymore,” he said.
Williams said the only two local agencies 911 Dispatch does not either dispatch for or provide technical support for are the Festus and Pevely police departments.
“We provide the 911 and radio technology for the Crystal City and De Soto police departments, but they do their own dispatching,” he said.
Williams said 911 is buying the radios through Motorola, the company the agency has worked with for years.
“It was not bid,” Williams added. “It’s a sole-source technology provider through Motorola.”
On Aug. 22, he said he planned to order the radios by the end of August as he was still calculating how many radios will be needed.
“There will be about 297 for law enforcement and 534 for fire and ambulance,” he said. “The price (per radio) is $6,287 for the fire and ambulance radios and $5,950 (per radio) for the law enforcement radios.”
Williams said the radios for fire and ambulance are more expensive because they are built “to withstand extreme temperatures.”
He said that in addition to the radios, he will order related equipment “like lapel mics and single-unit and bench chargers.”
Williams said he hopes the new radios will be delivered in October. Shortly after they arrive, the monumental task of distributing them to the various agencies around the county will begin.
“They’ll be distributed in the fall,” he said. “It will be a staggered rollout, probably to a couple of departments per week. We should be done by the end of the year.”
Williams said 911 uses a formula to determine how many devices to order for each agency.
Bob Dunn, chief of the Saline Valley Fire Protection District, said the formula is based on how many firetrucks or other vehicles each agency has, but he thinks it would be better to base the formula on the number of firefighters or staff members.
Dunn said 911 informed Saline Valley Fire that it would receive 36 handheld radios, but the fire district had requested 47.
“We’ve got 32 full-time people, and three command people, and we’d like to have a radio for each full-time person and two for each of the command people,” he said. “We’d like to have one on each of the firetrucks and auxiliary vehicles for a spare.”
Dunn said he recently met with Williams to talk about the formula and how many radios Saline Valley needs.
“When they (911 officials) come back and say what they can do, we will go from there,” Dunn said. “We’re glad to be getting the new radios. We’ve got a good dispatch center and a good relationship with them, and we hope to figure this out.”
How 911 Dispatch will deal with agency requests for more radios than what the formula calls for will be determined later, Williams said.
“I’m not sure what we’ll do for anyone who wants more, whether they’ll be responsible,” he said. “(The 911 Board of Directors) will make that decision.”
The seven-member 911 Board of Directors voted unanimously July 21 to buy the new radios.
Williams said the board did not hold a meeting Aug. 18 due to a lack of a quorum on its regularly scheduled date.