Douglas County considering SPLOST for new radio system

[INDY72]

"Great things happen when folks work together."
Your right on that one! We have discovered this fact in IN big time. On our local TRS for Marion, Hamilton, and Madison Counties, as well as the Statewide SAFE-T TRS, it works very well. Once everyone is properly trained on how it works, and does what they were trained to do it is very good! A properly designed and built out system is important, but proper training and implementation of that system is even more important once it is in the works! Politics and greed are IMHO just as deadly as bullets and explosions in the world of Public Safety! (Just been monitoring and involved in the field and dispatch for a long time, so just my $0.02... )

 

[DanRollman]

Great things happen when folks work together.

Absolutely right, Eric. And, of course, that is the first prerequisite to this crazy thing called interoperability, too. If leaders and/or field personnel don't particularly care about working together or improving their ability to intercommunicate when needed, no amount of technology or funding will matter.

South Fulton County is a pretty darn good example of small local public safety agencies working together, both on the fire and law enforcement side.

The same sort of thing happens to a lesser degree in North Fulton County, with a unified fire numbering system, and Alpharetta and Milton FDs on the same radio channels and working together. Sandy Springs and Roswell FDs work pretty closely together too, albeit dispatched on separate channels from separate PSAPs.

On the fire side, I'm not sure I've seen anywhere that beats metro Phoenix, Arizona. There, a single regional dispatch center (albeit a secondary PSAP) dispatches fire units from 26 jurisdictions covering 2,000 square miles on a unified radio system with unified numbering, common equipment, staffing, and training requirements, and a unified apparatus response plan that ignores jurisdictional boundaries. At lease on the fire side,a mass casualty incident or major fire is handled about as well in a 1-station suburb as it would be in downtown Phoenix, in large part because the distinction between departments and jurisdiction isn't especially evident to the guys actually staffing the more than 200 fire stations that participate.

And even departments 70+ miles from Phoenix that aren't part of the "auto aid" system for automatic consolidated responses still share a unified numbering system so that people clearly know who is who on traditional mutual aid responses.

On the fire side, Metro Atlanta would do well just to start with unified department and station numbering and go from there.

Dan