The Trenton Times published the following article on March 8, 2013. To read the full article, click here.
Trenton council approves $250,000 to start replacing police, fire radios
By Erin Duffy/The Times of Trenton
on March 08, 2013 at 12:30 PMTRENTON — City Council signed off last night on the first phase of a $3.5 million project to replace 1,500 police and fire radios, unanimously approving $250,000 in spending to begin buying and testing new radios.
Police Detective Charles Parrish and Fire Battalion Chief Steve Amiott gave a short presentation to council before the vote, explaining that the city’s 17-year-old Motorola radios are hitting their expiration date.
Bought in 1996, the portable handheld radios and mobile radios installed in police cars and fire trucks are starting to break down, with nine system outages logged since January alone, Parrish said. Twice, the radio outages lasted for several hours.
“The Motorola system we currently have now, some of the components are no longer comparable or replaceable,” Parrish said. “Eighty percent come back unrepairable by Motorola. They just don’t make the parts any more.”
A $3.5 million allocation to replace radios was included in the city’s fiscal year 2013 capital budget.
Parrish and Amiott said the two department’s began pricing out new radios and looking into joining radio systems in the area, eventually deciding on a Kenwood radio model that will cost the city about $1,000 per portable radio.
The radios will be interoperable, allowing responders from different agencies to communicate, and backwards compatible, meaning they can work with older technology.
“We called around to counties that have used Kenwood, contacted six or seven people who’ve used the radios and we have not had one person talk bad about the equipment, from police officers to sheriffs, fire departments,” Parrish said.
With the $250,000 authorization from council last night and $130,000 left over in capital funds, the two departments will be able to buy 300 portable and 100 mobile radios to test the equipment over the next several months, according to a city memo.
The city will buy another 600 radios in a second phase, and in a third phase this will buy the remaining radios as well as dispatch consoles, satellite receivers and amplifiers used to send and receive radio signals in high-rise buildings.
Parrish and Amiott said the departments also looked into joining the State Police system or a new Mercer County radio system that is in the works, but said the costs would be higher and the county system in particular would not be able to handle an additional 1,500 radios.
Contact Erin Duffy at (609) 989-5723 or eduffy@njtimes.com