County dialing in emergency radio bond specifics

A group of Tillamook County staff is working to finalize the details of a bond question to support the replacement of the county’s emergency radio system that they plan to bring to voters in November.

The new system would bring Tillamook’s emergency radio communications into the digital age and carries a projected price tag of $27 million.

“Now, we need to come into the 21st century and we need to increase reliability,” said Tillamook County Commissioner Doug Olson, “we need to do all those things technically.”

The system that currently supports emergency responders in the county was built between 2001 and 2003, following voter bond approval in 2001. The system consists of 12 towers spread across the county housing VHF repeaters.

According to Rueben Descloux, communication systems administrator, the old system is overburdened and becoming challenging to keep in service. The analog nature of the system limits the number of users that can simultaneously use the system while also constricting its range, making countywide communications impossible.

The analog system is also more prone to static or other interference than a replacement system would be, with sometimes troubling results.

Olson relayed the story of an officer-involved shooting that occurred last summer in Rockaway Beach during which the responding officers radioed for backup. But owing to interference other officers responding misheard the transmission and slowed their response believing the suspect was in custody.

In addition to the technical constraints, the physical infrastructure of the system is deteriorating and replacement parts are becoming hard to come by. This leaves the system at risk of failures that could not be repaired, according to a report on the system by Federal Engineering completed in 2020.

That report recommended that the county begin the process of replacing the aging system and a second report that year, also by Federal Engineers, recommended a new, digital system and provided a conceptual design.

At that point, the replacement system carried a projected budget of $20 million, but with inflation in the intervening years, that estimate has now risen to $27 million.

Tillamook County Chief of Staff Rachel Hagerty is also a part of the team working on the new system and is leading the work to put the financial package together to support the project. Hagerty was already able to secure a $2 million federal appropriation last year and recently applied for another $8.9 million in federal funding.

Hagerty is also working with bond consultants at Piper Sandler to determine the specifics of a bond question, which must be submitted by August for inclusion on the November ballot. Several factors, including the bond term and interest rates, will affect the tax rate necessary to support the bond but preliminary estimates from late 2023 showed a cost to taxpayers of between 15 and 38 cents per thousand dollars of assessed property value.

In tandem with those efforts, Olson and Descloux are working to ramp up a public outreach campaign to educate voters about the need for a new system and promote the bond.

The educational efforts will be led by Descloux, who exudes enthusiasm about the project and its implications for first responders across the county.

Improvements to the system’s functionality will be achieved by the new system’s reliance on transmitting digitally encoded, binary signals rather than physical radio waves across the VHF frequencies the county uses.

The encoded signals are much smaller than their analog counterparts, which will allow multiple users to communicate on the same channel simultaneously, reduce interference and increase signal range by 40%. The system will also be more automated, automatically switching between the transponders rather than requiring manual inputs by first responders and allow for remote monitoring by technicians.

While Descloux provides technical details, Olson will be leading the effort to convince Tillamook voters to support the bond. A political action committee is being formed as part of those efforts and Olson said that he has already booked a booth at the county fair.

The new system would be available to first responders free of charge, including any equipment upgrades needed, while other users would have to pay a fee and provide their own equipment.

Olson said that he is confident that the bond will gain voter support once the team has explained the current system’s limitations and the necessity and upside of the replacement.

“My experience has been, and I’ve done a lot of these over the years or been involved with them, is voters are smarter than you think and they also react to truthful messages,” Olson said. “If you hype it up and misrepresent something then you’ve just shot yourself in the foot but if they clearly understand there’s a need and why we need it, because it’s out of date, you can’t get parts, the public are literally at risk in some cases, I think there’s a good chance they’ll support it.”