FAYETTEVILLE — A recent federal appropriation puts the city of Fayetteville about $750,000 closer to purchasing a $7.3 million citywide radio system for police, firefighters and other city services.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2010, signed by President Barack Obama last Wednesday, includes the money toward Fayetteville’s plan to buy a Motorola Astro 23 LE digital wireless communication system.
The city also received $440,000 in federal funds in 2008 and $500,000 in 2009.
“We’re still a long way from the $7 million we need to purchase the system, but every bit we can get appropriated by the feds is that much less we’ll have to come up with in the future,” said Fayetteville Police Chief Greg Tabor.
It’s been nearly a decade since Fayetteville funded a major upgrade of its existing radio system. The proposed purchase would be an all-new radio system. Tabor said his department, which takes the lead for city agencies in planning for the citywide system, views reliable radio communication as critical to emergency responses.
“I’ve been in a lot situations where I wanted to communicate and couldn’t, and it’s very frustrating,” Tabor said. Having radio communications that can be trusted is getting harder with the existing system as the city grows, he said.
For officers, an effective radio system is a lifeline. In emergency responses, the ability to communicate with other officers and emergency services is key to coordinated responses to quickly developing situations, police say.
The proposed system would also provide communication for the Fayetteville Fire Department and other nonemergency offices such as Parks and Recreation or water and sewer services.
Battalion Chief Kyle Curry said firefighters rely on the radio system for everything from dispatch to receiving vital information on the way to a blaze or accident to coordinating response once on the scene.
In mass-scale tragedies, the new system will let emergency crews from all over Arkansas who come to Fayetteville speak to each other using their own equipment. Now, to accomplish that level of communication in many cases, a local agency has to provide visiting crews with local radios, Curry said.
The system’s compatibility with a statewide, integrated radio system is one of the key attractions of a new system.
More than a decade ago, Arkansas set out to redefine its communication system statewide. The result, called the Arkansas Wireless Information Network, sought to end decades of using independent radio systems among the state’s public safety agencies. Those systems could not connect with each other.
As it now stands, officers traveling outside Fayetteville’s area on city business typically have to rely on cell phones for communication.
“If I’m in Little Rock and I need to talk with someone in Fayetteville, I can do that with this system,” Tabor said.
So far, the city has secured a total of about $1.5 million in federal funding for the purchase of the new radio system. Tabor expects more funding to come through the city’s collection of impact fees on new construction.
“We hope to use impact fees, which is what you pay when you get a building permit,” Tabor said. “That would bring us to about $3 million.”
The city approved those impact fees in 2005.
Although the new radio system will interact with the statewide system and improve coverage for all agencies as they operate in or near Fayetteville, Arkansas has left it to individual cities and counties to pay for their own improvements.
“We don’t really have a timetable,” Tabor said. “The money we’ve got, we’ve got three years to spend.”
If the remainder of the funding isn’t found by then, Tabor said, the city will begin buying the radios needed for the new system that will also work with the current system.