They are replacing it. They are not re-using any of the old infrastructure other than towers. The transition from one system to another is a pain and there are always issues. You wind up with users on both systems and TGs between systems patched together. Trust me, in that situation, patches suck. Been there and done that. Here is Morgan Co we moved roughly 1700 users from VHF, UHF, and 800 EDACS to P-25 and it was a lot of work and there were all kinds of problems. B'ham/JeffCo there are probably close to 10,000 users. I can't imagine how much of a PITA moving everyone is.
As far as encryption goes, you guys can armchair-quarterback all you want but I can tell you no one just randomly popped up and said "Hey, let's encrypt everything." There were meetings with user agency heads and decisions were made on how many TGs each agency needs, how they want them named, whether or not to encrypt, and other things. Yeah, I get it that encryption sucks for scanner listeners but at the same time you have people like some the idiots up here that either (A) post a text summary every radio transmission to a FB scanner group or (B) follow the police or show up on scenes in private vehicles that closely resemble local LE, and dressed like LE, carrying the same radios as LE (but programmed as a scanner), carrying weapons like LE and people wonder why agencies want to encrypt radio channels. Another thing... if you are pulled over on a traffic stop, do you want the officer to give your name, dob, and SSN over a clear channel for all the bad guys to record and then use to open accounts in your name?
