MONROE — A new emergency radio system for Green County first responders and other public safety workers is slated to replace the existing aging and unreliable system in mid-2021.

The Green County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved two related radio contracts totaling about $3.1 million at its December board meeting.

One contract, for $2,932,773.82 is with Baycom Inc., a Wisconsin-based provider of public safety communications systems. The other contract, for $189,000, is with True North Consulting Group, which will oversee the installation. True North is based in Naperville, Illinois, but has locations in Washington, D.C. and Madison.

“We just had the contracts signed and returned in the second week of January,” said Tom Moczynski, chief deputy at the Green County Sheriff’s Office and the county’s lead on the project.

The contracts cover only the first stage of installment, Moczynski said.

In total, $5.3 million is budgeted for the radio project. The county will consider continuing contracts as project milestones are met. Moczynski expects continuing contracts to go before the board in spring or early summer and, on “a loose timeframe,” the system to go into operation in mid-2021.

Planning for a new radio system has been ongoing for about three years. The Green County Ad-Hoc Radio Committee formed in early 2017 to research and prepare for the project. It chose Baycom after reviewing proposals from two vendors, General Communications and Baycom, according to Moczynski.

Tanna McKeown, director of Green County Emergency Management, acknowledges the project is “a big-ticket item” but said it’s essential to improving communication between agencies in emergency situations.

“We have a very dedicated group of people that are really watching this closely,” said McKeown. “I just want to be sure that we get the radio coverage that we are asking for and that the equipment being sold is going to provide that.”

Currently, “a lot of the agencies have a very difficult time talking to each other,” she said. “The terrain of Green County impedes that. We have a lot of hills and valleys. But sometimes you can be right across the street and not talk to somebody.”

Steve Isley, chief of the Juda Fire Department, said he encountered a problem with the current radio system while on scene at a call southeast of the Juda fire district near Oakley a few weeks ago.

Fortunately, the problem didn’t cause any delay in the response of firefighters, he said, but once on scene, “we were unable to communicate some with dispatch,” Isley said.

“After we got on scene, some of our communication was not very good because of the location,” he said.

Isley is looking forward to having the new radio system in place.

“I hope it takes care of our dead spots that we have in our community,” he said.

When Isley was having issues with the current radio system on the recent call near Oakley, he ended up using his cellphone instead to communicate with dispatch.

Cellphones may be the future of emergency response communications. In 2012, Congress established the First Responder Network Authority, aka FirstNet, within the U.S. Department of Commerce to equip first responders with wireless broadband voice and data communication. The cellphone company to snag the contract with the federal government on the project is AT&T.

FirstNet went live in 2018 and last year boasted that “nearly 9,000 public safety agencies and organizations have subscribed” to the network.

Moczynski expects to see more private-public partnerships like this over the next decade but doesn’t consider the technology reliable yet.

“I think everyone in public safety is interested in where that’s going to go,” he said, but “right now for critical public safety, it just isn’t there yet. ... The cellphone coverage isn’t there yet. It just isn’t up to snuff yet.”

For now, in Green County, it’s better to have a self-contained radio system that is county-owned and county-operated, Moczynski said.

The existing radio system was designed in the early 2000s. It is aging and has become a challenge to maintain, Moczynski said.

In addition, a 2013 mandate from the Federal Communications Commission requiring a switch from 25 kHz to 12.5 kHz, commonly referred to as “narrowbanding,” has squeezed the outdated system’s capabilities. Narrowbanding has caused a loss of “20 to 30% of perceived coverage,” Moczynski said.

There are areas of the county “where quite often our dispatch center can hear” first responders but first responders can’t hear dispatch due to environmental factors including low-lying terrain, heavy foliage or being indoors, he said. The New Glarus area and the southeast corner of the county are known problem spots.

With the new system, “we’re enhancing our coverage and reliability. ... We’re really looking to improve our capacity both on the street and in buildings,” Moczynski said. The sheriff’s office, highway department, all EMS and fire departments, the health department, emergency management and all village police departments will use the system. The city police departments of Brodhead and Monroe maintain their own systems but will have interoperability with the system, Moczynski said.

The design calls for two new tower sites for a total of nine radio towers, but no new construction. Instead, the county will be repurposing existing structures by leasing the two additional tower sites on Nye Road and Pinnow Road, Moczynski said. The remaining seven sites include a large county-owned tower at County C and County J as well as locations in Browntown, Brooklyn, by the sheriff’s office in Monroe and the water towers in Brodhead and Albany.

The new system will provide “much more blanketed coverage,” Moczynski said. He expects it to have a lifespan of about 10 to 12 years.