A few dozen of Montgomery County’s new $3,600-a-piece police radios had to be returned to the manufacturer, Motorola, after they inexplicably shut off at times, county officials said Thursday.
The 30 or so police radios that didn’t work properly were part of an initial rollout of 300 to four towns in the county, which has now postponed handing out the rest of the more than 3,000 scheduled to be given to all municipal police departments, deputy public safety director John Corcoran said.
Corcoran said the initial plan was to have all the radios in operation by the end of 2016, but that schedule has now been pushed back into 2017. The four towns that were initially given the new radios are Norristown, Cheltenham, Montgomery and Abington.
“Roughly 10 percent were just arbitrarily shutting off and they weren’t giving the field user any reason for it,” he said. “It could have been a very real safety hazard.”
The new radios are part of a $36 million overhaul of the county’s emergency communications network.
Dead spots in emergency radio coverage have also been addressed as part of the overhaul, which began in 2012.
Twenty-nine of 30 new giant antennas have been erected or are currently in construction. The lone antenna yet to be built or approved remains in the middle of a zoning dispute in Upper Merion.
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First Assistant County Solicitor Josh Stein said Thursday that the county will bring its plan for the last antenna before Upper Merion’s zoning board in the near future. Township officials have demanded that the county go through the zoning process like any other applicant would in requesting a variance to existing zoning code. The county will have to seek approval of a new, higher tower at a site along Hughes Road where a shorter tower already exists.
Several residents along Hughes Road are against the proposal, according to some local and county officials.
The new delay to completing the emergency communications overhaul, having Motorola reissue the radios, is a setback, according to Corcoran, but he added that no police officer or resident in any of the four towns were put in harm’s way because of the faulty devices -- luckily.
“it’s an issue and we’re working to fix it. But it didn’t cause any safety issues before we found it out,” Corcoran said. “Nobody was endangered before we discovered the problem.”
The original schedule announced in August for handing out the radios to all of the county’s municipalities was by the end of September. All fire and EMS departments were then to have their new radios by October.
The county secured funding of more than $6 million for all of the new radios through the Delaware Valley Regional Finance Agency (DVRFA). The municipalities will have to pay back the county for the cost of the radios, but the county is not charging interest that came with the financing from the DVRFA.
In Norristown, the radios cost $326,000, officials said in August.
In 2009, Philadelphia officials were forced to embark on an overhaul of its emergency dispatch system because of faulty Motorola radios. The city did agree to keep Motorola as its radio provider, but officials said switching to a new provider would have cost millions more and at least five years to complete the transition.
At the time, some officers said they were forced to keep their cell phones nearby in case the unreliable hand-held radios conked out on them. The city agreed to pay Motorola $34 million to upgrade its system.
