The main hold up for upgrading the Wallingford, CT’s emergency radio system has been the $1.5 million price tag. The town had hoped to avoid the expense of a new tower, reports the RecordJournal, having already spent several million dollars in communication improvements over the past few years.
“We were really, really hopeful that we were not going to need a tower,” confirmed Police Station Steering Committee Chairman and former Police Chief William Wright. “We were really hopeful that there could be an antenna array on the roof of the new police department so we wouldn’t need the tower.”
However, two separate feasibility studies both determined that there needs to be another cell tower at the police station. Both the town and Motorola Solutions agreed that the four cell towers in Wallingford and fifth tower in North Branford blanket the surrounding area with digital connectivity. The new cell tower will be devoted to emergency response services and public welfare and will be located at the site of the new police station, a former 3M office building.
The Town Council met last week and approved a change to the bonding ordinance that will finance the new police facilities. The amended agreement will add $1.5 million to the project, bringing the total bond to $38 million. In more precise figures, the council agreed that the $1,446,832 addition will pay to move materials from the old police station to the new one. It will also cover the cost to install the new station’s dispatch center and network, and to program the antennas in the new location.
Since the town of Wallingford has a long history of working with Motorola, the council suggested that a bid waiver would be appropriate. When questioned by a council member about the possibility of shopping for a lower bid, Chairman Wright explained, “We are very concerned about a different vendor coming in and providing this work for us so that should there be a problem, we don’t want to get into a back and forth between Motorola, who is already under contract with the town, and whoever this other company might be as to who is responsible for the failure in the network.”
Wright said, “Right now, through a lot of hard work that the town recognizes, [the area] has 100 percent coverage. We don’t want to have the possibility of that coverage being interrupted and have finger pointing when our most valuable resources are in need of the system.”
Wright agreed, that yes, it was frustrating that the need for the extra tower was discovered later in the process rather than at an earlier planning stage. “I think when we put this bid out a large chunk, if a tower was included in that, we could have possibly saved some money,” he told the RecordJournal. “I’m a little upset about that.”
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