The St. Louis County Board of Commissioners approved a $4.4 million contract Tuesday to purchase new 800-megahertz radios and related equipment from Motorola for the county Sheriff's Office.
The purchase will move the county toward compliance with a mandate for all law enforcement and emergency agencies to move from analog VHF to digital radio systems.
It's only part of more than $8 million in upgrades the Sheriff's Office will make for the new digital communications system. County taxpayers will be on the hook for an estimated $5.9 million of that total unless the county can find more grant money.
The county system will be part of the Minnesota Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response -- ARMER -- trunked digital radio system under which St. Louis County radios will be able to communicate with any other 800-MHz radio anywhere in the state. The State Patrol and several other counties and cities already have moved to the new system. The Duluth Police Department is making the switch to digital at the same time as the county.
It's an upgrade in technology similar to when television broadcast moved from analog to digital, and ultimately mandated by the same Federal Communications Commission.
ADVERTISEMENT
The public will notice the changeover to digital police radios when their old analog scanners eventually grow quiet. New digital scanners generally cost $500 or more.
Tuesday's purchase was approved by a 7-0 vote of the board in Mountain Iron. But several commissioners expressed concerns over a program mandated, but not paid for, by the state.
"I think the most upsetting is that the county is going to have to pay the state (nearly) $250,000 in sales tax on this purchase when a lot of other (law enforcement departments) were exempted from the sales tax," said Commissioner Chris Dahlberg of Duluth.
Commissioner Steve O'Neil of Duluth said the county will continue to press the issue with the state and could see retroactive legislation in the 2012 session to forgive the sales tax portion of new radio purchases.
The Statewide Radio Board was created by the Minnesota Legislature in 2004 to develop a compatible form of secure communication to be used by all law enforcement, emergency and public safety personnel throughout the state.
Counties are responsible for system portions they built, but must operate within state rules.
The digital nature of the new system gives 911 emergency administrators the ability to assign a channel to a specific incident. That channel can then be monitored by all local and assisting departments involved in the incident.
Critics, including some rural sheriff's officials in other counties, say the system is too expensive and uses dated technology that won't blend well with computers and smart phones already in use by many officers in the field.
