Jack Lakowsky – The Day, New London, Conn.
East Lyme — The radios clipped to the hips of East Lyme’s first responders don’t work as they should, and the town has said it will do whatever it takes to fix the problem, a threat to the safety of police, firefighters and the public alike.
The town has formed a task force of emergency service leaders to determine short- and long-term solutions for the problem, which First Selectman Dan Cunningham called a top priority, and so far has budgeted $1.6 million to pay for any new equipment or infrastructure, Finance Director Kevin Gervais said. The group meets monthly.
That $1.6 million price, though, doesn’t include the nearly $500,000 in federal COVID-19 relief money the town previously spent on new handheld radios that completely failed. Those devices, Harris radios, now sit unused because of a software licensing issue with the vendor.
And the town has little means of recuperating that money, Cunningham said. They’re virtually unsellable without the software and legal action wouldn’t go anywhere, he said.
“The issue has been going on for years,” Cunningham told the police commission in August. “Firefighters can’t talk to police, police can’t talk to dispatch.”
Lt. Mike Macek recently told the Board of Police Commissioners that sometimes, the poorly working radios force officers to call dispatchers on their cellphones.
“This is really a very serious safety issue, if they can’t communicate effectively” Cunningham said. “It’s a very serious deficiency.”
The town has a new contract with a company that will improve existing equipment. The company, Goosetown Communications, has identified ways to double coverage, an immediate way of at least easing the issue before the town figures out how to achieve its ultimate goal, getting East Lyme’s emergency communications on a statewide system Connecticut runs.
But getting on the state system is tricky, Cunningham said. Connecticut needs a municipality’s own system to be robust and updated enough to get on the state’s without disrupting or corrupting it with bad signals.
“We can’t be an island,” Cunningham said. “It will cost money to get there, but it’s something we have to do, whatever it takes.”
Cunningham said the radios in the town’s emergency vehicles, hooked up to strong batteries, work fine.
‘I’m just shocked’
Macek told police commissioners the task force’s most immediate goal is to stabilize what the town has now, looking at current infrastructure within the emergency management building on Route 156 and at equipment still housed in the former dispatch center on Boston Post Road.
Now that the town is working with Goosetown, the state will be more open to talks with the town about getting on the state’s communication systems, Macek said.
“I think we’ve got a good path for the short-term goal for now,” Macek said.
But the long-term fix of getting on the state system is at least two years off, Macek said, even if the town bought all new equipment and upgraded local communications towers.
Commissioner Joseph Perkins said he thought the issue was fixed and asked how the issue “fell into the trash can this way.”
“I thought we had a handle on this thing,” Perkins said.
Cunningham said previous attempts at improving emergency communications failed because different departments pursued individual projects, rather than collaborate and make a single, organized effort.
“We’re organized now,&#