When I say budget, I guess a few hundered dollars isn't out of the question but I'm sure that's still not enough.
Even if it was OK'd to be used in this fashion, what issues do you see with OSHA or FCC? Just curious.
As far as the FCC goes, to operate on the public safety frequencies, your radio will need to be certified for Part-90 use and unmodified. To operate on the ham bands, no such certification is required, so a radio that covers the required bands without modification should work just fine. As others have said, there are very few radios that will do that and those are very expensive.
Operating an uncertified radio on the ham bands is just fine, although as the operator, you are responsible for making sure that the radio doesn't exceed rather strict limits on emissions outside of the ham bands. This is generally not a problem since most Part-90 certified radios are well designed and work well, and often the ham bands they'll work on are even within the design specs for their coverage.
Operating an uncertified radio on the Public Service bands COULD have you and the agency face huge fines ($10,000 per day per violation). While this can often go without detection, it's still a possibility. Most agencies will not want the risk and will not allow such operation anyway. Even if they do, as their "agent", do you really want to be on the hook for the fine and explaining why you caused this huge problem for them?
One other thing to think about is what are the rules for the system you'll be using this radio on. Often the large multi-agency systems have strict rules on what radios are allowed on them, who can operate them, who can program them, who can supply them, etc. They also monitor their systems closely and are quick to kill any radios that are not authorized, or that appear to be clones of others on the system. Once killed, that expensive radio is basically just that, killed. It will no longer work without a trip to the manufacturer who will require the agency certifying that it was killed in error and authorizing them to repair it (not an inexpensive task either).
