Money moved for AWIN payment

A line item transfer approved earlier this week positioned Garland County to make the final payment on its contract with Motorola for communication system improvements.

The 5 percent, or $299,555, withheld from the $5,991,112 contract will be paid after secondary radio programming is completed, county officials said. The programming will address any issues public safety and service personnel have had with the radios since they were put into service last year and arrange talk group templates for better efficiency, Garland County Department of Emergency Management Director Bo Robertson said.

"They'll make sure talk groups are in the proper spot and streamline how the process works," he said. "We won't know what needs to be corrected until we get some beneficial use out of the radios."

Follow-up programming should be completed by June, officials said.

The Garland County Quorum Court Finance Committee moved money for the final payment from the capital improvement fund's maintenance and repair line item to the construction in progress category. Intrafund transfers do not have to be approved by the full quorum court.

About $5 million in excess collections of the five-eighths cent sales tax voters passed in 2011 to build the $42 million detention center on Albert Pike Road paid for the bulk of the Motorola contract. The initial $5,580,000 price grew to almost $6 million after change orders, including $114,805 for a 911 call recording system and $296,306 in sales taxes, were added.

The county said it had planned to pay sales tax separately, but Motorola priced it into the contract.

The communications upgrade made the county a full-time user on the Arkansas Wireless Information Network, the state system used by more than 900 local, state and federal agencies. Officials have said joining AWIN's multi-jurisdictional, interoperable platform allows county personnel to communicate with other agencies without carrying multiple radios.

A spreadsheet provided by the county finance department showed the contract included 420 radios totaling $1.36 million, including 147 vehicle-mounted units and 258 handhelds. All are AWIN capable, but the contract included 60 tri-band handhelds that can operate on both the AWIN and VHF spectrums. They also have digital tone signaling capability for emergency paging.

Robertson said the county is one of the state's first jurisdictions to use AWIN for paging.

The contract included 157 handhelds for the county's nine volunteer fire departments. Those units combined with radios purchased through a $600,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency grant outfitted personnel for all nine departments with AWIN-capable radios, Robertson said, explaining that without the grant the county's new 911 communications center would have needed a VHF capability to dispatch volunteer firefighters.

"That allowed us to not have a hybrid dispatch center," he said. "So for the cost of 157 radios, it allowed us to go to AWIN across the board."

The county will begin dispatching volunteer firefighters later this year.

Infrastructure supporting the county's use of AWIN and connecting it to the AWIN communications core in Little Rock was the biggest piece of the contract, totaling more than $3 million that included construction of a 100-foot communications tower on Ouachita Pinnacle Mountain north of Lake Ouachita and a 300-foot tower on Pearcy Mountain in west Garland County.

A repeater, microwave dish and other equipment were added to the AWIN tower near the Lake Ricks city reservoir. That tower connects to the county 911 communications center inside the old detention center via the city-county tower on West Mountain.

The contract included $33,060 for a 100-foot tower extending from the communications center, linking it to West Mountain, as part of the roughly $870,000 the contract allocated for the new facility. It features Next Generation 911 technology that allows dispatchers to track the location of sheriff's deputies on the county GIS map in real time.

The $497,000 simulcast feature improves radio coverage by combining the signal strength of the Pearcy Mountain, Ouachita Pinnacle Mountain and Lake Ricks towers, Robertson said.

Local on 01/19/2019

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