A request for new radios for the Columbia County sheriff’s and fire departments has been made.
During the Management and Internal Services Committee meeting on Tuesday, March 14, County Manager Scott Johnson told the committee members a request has come from public safety for an upgrade to the 530 radios. The current radios are just over 10 years old and out of warranty.
“They still work fine, but they do not have some of the latest features that the new radios have and some of the things the sheriff needs, and I believe the fire department needs,” Johnson said.
The county was looking at trading in the radios to Motorola, who was offering $500 each for the radios, but Johnson said on the secondary market the radios were going from $1,500 to $2,000. He asked that the request he was presenting be modified and not do the trade.
“That will do two things for us. One, it will allow us to keep the radios that are currently in use, and we’ll still be able to use those,” Johnson said. “We were going to keep some of them anyway, so this will allow us to keep more of those. We do have some departments that are putting radios in their budgets right now, they don’t need the fancy, higher end radios that the sheriff’s office needs, but we can reuse these radios.”
Columbia County Sheriff Clay Whittle spoke to the committee members and said the issue with the old radios is they stop working if deputies leave the county, which is happening more. An example he gave was recently when a deputy chased a stolen truck all the way to Morgan County.
“One of my guys spotted it before it got out of the county, and of course the race ensued up I-20,” Whittle said. “We lost him halfway in McDuffie County, no longer radio communication, no longer a blip on that screen in the real time crime center, literally had to get his cell phone out and try and do that until he could, because of the time at night it was hard to get smaller agencies up on I-20 to help him. Finally Morgan County was helping him and they intercepted him and they got him.”
This wasn’t the first time that communication had been lost with deputies leaving the county. What started the request for new radios was when CCSO deputies were searching for a stolen show dog that ended up in Richmond County.
“My officers, my investigators and a few of my uniformed officers ended up in the lower end of Richmond County hunting for this dog in an area they are not familiar with,” Whittle said. “We lost them on the screens. We literally had the map up. We lost them.”
While deputies were able to recover the dog, Whittle said the issue was that they lost communication with the deputies. He added the same thing has happened to the fire department before when they responded to another county.
“These new radios, the bottom line on them is they use our towers here in Columbia County,” Whittle said. “They use cell towers anywhere, and if you get specific, which we should here in the county, you add in a SSID number…and the WIFI inside any of our county buildings would actually be able to operate any of our radios with the precision that literally separates them, it literally can sperate them floor to floor to floor… That’s the beauty of this whole new system, they operate three ways, our antennas, cell phone antennas and WIFI, anywhere.”
Commissioner Connie Melear asked about the radios working with other county systems. Whittle said it can, and Columbia County has an agreement with Richmond County for a channel where they can cross talk.
“The problem is you lose, the current system doesn’t integrate with the GPS location,” Whittle said. “The messaging system that is on the radios and says we can actually send messages, the new radios not only would we be able to send messages, they can send pictures back and forth. Why is that important? Catching a bad guy and getting a photo of the actual suspect you’re looking for or when it comes to lost children and lost elderly people that we hunt almost weekly. You get a picture from a family member and within a matter of seconds every officer out there has a picture of that person on their radio to be able to look and compare to.”
If the county decides it doesn’t need all the radios, then the ones not needed could be put up for sale on gov deals, Johnson said.
“The only thing that I’m asking for different here is, as opposed to approving the $4.58 million, that would go up $200,000 so the total number would be $4.78 million would be the total that we’re asking for,” Johnson said. “This is coming from the 17-22 SPLOST 911 upgrades. We did collect additional funding there, so we have the funds to be able to do this.”
The commission approved moving the item forward to the Columbia County Board of Commissioners.
