The rest of the story...
There's a lot of historic background in Bergen County and some of what you've asked might be clearer with the background. Many years ago, Bergen County was just above the AM broadcast dial. They eventually settled on 37.38 MHz, where they maintained a Plectron tone alerting system to send messages to other police departments in different zones of the county. Each alert usually consisted of 6 Plectron tones, usually followed by a broadcast centered on someone eloping from Bergen Pines or the JINS (juveniles in need of supervision) shelter. In the mid-70s, the county obtained 3 T-Band channels for its operations and built out a "County Alert" system on the channel that used to be called "Channel 3." Around the late 70s, to early 80s, every dispatch center had a Mocom-70 T-Band consolette, every supervisor's car had a T-Band Maxar, and every patrol car had a Motorola tabletop monitor radio bolted under the glove compartment. You might have seen the rigid "Oil Derek" antennas back then.
Unfortunately for the T-Band system, when it was first built-out, the main site was at the Palisades Interstate Park maintenance yard in Alpine. It didn't exactly provide the coverage expected. The primary system was moved to Stag Hill in Mahwah through the 80s, with voting receivers in various places throughout the county. And, equally unfortunate for County Alert, SPEN 1 was developed in the late 70s. It did a better job. By the mid 80s, the County Alert receivers were out of the cars and most departments stopped maintaining the Channel 3 control stations.
Channel 3 went on to be used for additional information and eventually became claimed by the Sheriff for civil process and off-campus operations. Some of these frequencies were severely limited because they had to have geographic separation from Nassau County, which also used them. When additional spectrum was procured, Nassau moved and allowed Bergen County to expand. More recently, in the 00's, the old Part 22 IMTS channels in T-Band (originally deployed at Edwin Armstrong's [the inventor of FM radio] Alpine tower by a man named Charlie Sackermann, and on the air until about 1988) were petitioned for and divided between Bergen, Westchester, Fort Lee, and other communities, opening enough channels for those communities to build trunked systems.
Now, a faction of Congress wants T-Band back for auction because it signed off giving "public safety" the 700 MHz upper D Block. There is a committee in the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council which is working on what to do with this issue, but the reality is that certain Representatives believe that the agencies which have lost spectrum can be accommodated by radio "apps" operating in the D Block and other LTE systems. As it stands, T-Band radio operators have 9 years to vacate, and public safety is given the opportunity to be made whole (on low band?), but there is no greenspace or even brownspace to put them in the NYC metro. Business operators got left with the name of Tony Soprano's boat. They have absolutely no provision in law to be made whole. And, the law is silent on television, with the presumption that TV doesn't have to do anything and spectrum would be auctioned around it (which, effectively makes the plan stupid and useless for national deployment without geographically aware devices). Bergen County has only 7 700 MHz narrowband channels allotted to it, so let's see if that could accommodate the five dozen or so discrete T-Band channels in use. If the Congressional kickback plan sticks, don't worry about this P25 system and encryption.
Then we have Channel 11. That's 155.5500 MHz. Going back to the 70s, it was shared with other communities. For example, Cliffside Park used this as an infrequently-used secondary channel to 155.6100. Last I remember hearing anything on it was 1977. This was abandoned and deleted from the license. Westchester maintained active operations on this channel, and the interaction between Bergen and Westchester. The repeater was located about as far west of Westchester as one could go in Bergen County. Now, it's coming back as a simulcast system with a number of sharply directional antennas and relatively low effective radiated powers to stay out of Westchester. The intent is for a one talk-path liaison channel between VHF communities and UHF communities. That would be an active switch-over and not a patch.
Also pay attention to the UTAC channels, as well as the UTACs that are not on the national plan (you will find them in the RR database). In different systems on the same band, actually switching from channel to channel is more spectrum efficient than patching two dissimilar systems together. It also reduces the possibility of desensitization. On a trunked system, though, if everyone operated on the same system, patching is fairly easy and steers the patched resources over to a completely different patch talkgroup instead of tying up two or more TGs for one conversation. More and more, long-term complex incidents are relying on the Incident Command System and ICS-205 communications plans put together by a COML who selects the most appropriate resources.
As for why agencies did not jump onto the system, know that this subscriber equipment costs more than a conventional UHF or VHF transceiver. The bottom line is king. Likewise, over 100 years of home rule in some communities can only be bent by a lack of revenue. Maybe some of the dust will settle after the narrowbanding deadline. For some towns, it might have been a break-even point to buy into the county system rather than buy compatible narrowband capable equipment (even though subscriber costs are more, they won't have to maintain networks of base stations anymore - and that will negatively impact the radio service vendor community, which remains relatively healthy and competitive in the area compared to other parts of the country).
I hope this historic background fills in some of the blanks and answers some of your questions, Vic.
