I have noticed a lot of work at the tower site located behind the current police department location on North Ross Street. One of my sources with Opelika told me that the City of Opelika offered to install a tower on the southwest side of Auburn so that the ALFRN that OPD uses would fully cover Auburn. Auburn turned down the proposal. I questioned the Montgomery Metro deal at a city council meeting before a vote on spending over a million on Harris equipment, the city's public safety director said that OPD's system is a Motorola system and is too costly to maintain citing Opelika spent 2 million on upgrading their system, what he failed to mention was that upgrade was to tie OPD into the Alabama First Responders Network, he made it seem that every few years a Motorola system will require millions of dollars in upgrades. When I questioned why Auburn would not want to be on the same system they mutual aide with I was told one channel would be available for Auburn to communicate with Opelika. This can be done now with OPD patching APD's VHF channel to any of OPD's talkgroups such as Dispatch or TAC-1. On Auburn University gamedays OPD patches Lee SO TAC West, State Net, and OPD Event talk group together. I did it many times in my days of dispatching for OPD. OPD has VHF mobiles in their units to monitor Lee SO and APD, back in May when the 3 Auburn officers were ambushed and one killed both OPD and Lee SO heard the "Double Zero shots fired" call on their in-car VHF radios and responded before APD even hit the ringdown lines to call for assistance.
Harris is lining pockets to expand to every area they can. Macon County flat told them no, even after Montgomery Metro offered to build the system and buy the mobiles and portables too.
Because of money and politics, the 3 law enforcement agencies will be on 3 different systems. It is a shame that a system already in place that has the capacity to cover the entire county including the VFD's is only utilized by one agency when OPD built their system the SO and APD agreed to join in on it but after the build was started APD and the SO backed out.
