Shared from the 11/3/2019 Hot Springs Sentinel Record  eEdition

ACTI closure increases radio system cost, delays rollout

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The Sentinel-Record/Tanner Newton

PLAN B: The Springs Hotel will host a key piece of equipment for the city’s public safety communications system. The equipment was being installed at the former Army and Navy General Hospital when the state announced it was closing the building.

The more than $120 million 2020 budget the Hot Springs Board of Directors will consider Tuesday night includes $1.5 million in change orders for the city’s public safety communications system project, a consequence of the former Army and Navy General Hospital’s unavailability as a host site for a critical repeater in the system’s microwave network.

The building’s strategic perch overlooking downtown Central Avenue would have allowed radio signals to reach into and out of downtown and also cover the Highway 70 east area. With state funding for the building uncertain after June, the city did not consider it a viable location for a repeater site. Communications equipment was being installed on the ninth floor earlier this year when the state announced its plan to shutter the building by the end of the year.

Arkansas Rehabilitation Services, the state agency overseeing the Arkansas Career Training Institute, or ACTI, the residential workforce training program that’s been housed at the building since the federal government deeded it to the state in 1960, recently said funding is in place for electricity and building security through June.

City officials and a local committee working to prevent the building from degenerating into a civic and safety liability have said the age of its electrical system makes restoring service unlikely if the electricity were turned off for an extended period.

The city expected to begin testing the $5 million system in September, one of the final steps in a process that began in earnest when the city board adopted a temporary 2.6 general fund millage in November 2016 to fund the project. But the building’s closure will delay the system’s rollout for at least another year, Hot Springs Fire Chief Ed Davis told City Manager Bill Burrough in a recent email.

The cost of the city’s $4.9 million contract with Motorola will increase by at least $1 million, Burrough told the board earlier this week. The budget proposal includes $1.5 million for potential change orders.

“It’s probably going to come to around $1 million,” he told city directors. “I want to make sure we have enough in the budget in case there’s something else we don’t have. I don’t want to have to come back and change that. We’ve got about $1.5 million in the budget. If we don’t use it, it will go back into the reserve.”

The increase is driven by the two locations the city needs to offset the loss of the ACTI site. Davis said earlier this week that the city plans to locate the repeater for the Highway 70 east area on the Vertical Bridge Tower near the intersection of East Grand Avenue and Kelton Street. A smaller repeater with a dedicated fiber-optic link to the Hot Springs Police Department’s dispatch center will be located on top of the Springs Hotel on upper Central Avenue.

It will project radio signals into the hard-to-reach downtown area known as the dogleg, the first six blocks of Central Avenue from Fountain Street to the junction with Whittington and Park avenues.

“Those buildings and the immediate area around them are hard to penetrate,” Davis said. “A localized set of antennas will really help with that coverage. Downtown Hot Springs is a difficult place to establish good radio connectivity. Hopefully, it solves those problems in the downtown and immediate area.”

Davis said verbal agreements to lease space for the equipment have been secured from both property owners.

The East Grand site will become part of the microwave ring relaying radio signals transmitted by vehicle-mounted and handheld radios. The ring will also connect local communications systems to the Arkansas Wireless Information Network hub in Little Rock, Davis said.

AWIN is the interoperable staterun platform used by more than 900 federal, state and local agencies. The state allows local agencies to join AWIN without paying user fees. In return, localities build out infrastructure, such as repeater sites, that increase the network’s reach, quality and reliability.

Affect on county

County Judge Darryl Mahoney told justices of the peace last month that the delayed rollout of the city’s communications system is affecting radio coverage north of the city.

A dead spot in the Fountain Lake area will persist until the city’s system goes live, Mahoney said. Sheriff’s deputies who recently worked the Fox Pass area under the grant the department received as part of its inclusion in the Selective Traffic Enforcement Program, which pays overtime deputies incur enforcing traffic laws, had no coverage on their handheld radios.

“The other morning they wrote 39 tickets in two hours,” Mahoney told JPs at last month’s budget hearing. “Once an officer gets out of the car, he has nothing. We’re going to get that corrected this year. When it comes to public safety, I want those portables to have 95% coverage.”

A communications tower on the ridgeline north of Fox Pass Cutoff hosts the northernmost node in the city’s microwave ring. Mahoney said he’s reached an agreement with the city that will allow the county to use equipment the city has on the tower, expanding radio coverage north until the city’s system comes online. In return, the county will pay the city’s lease on the tower, he said.

“We’ve secured an agreement with them to bring that one tower up,” he told JPs. “As long as we pay the lease, we can use their equipment.”

The county became a fulltime AWIN member last year after committing almost $6 million to its communications project, which included augmenting AWIN’s network by building communications towers on Ouachita Pinnacle Mountain north of Lake Ouachita and Pearcy Mountain in west Garland County.

Mahoney told JPs he’s withholding 5% of the county’s $5.9 million contract with Motorola, as lingering issues need to be resolved before he releases $299,555 in retainage.

“At this point, after meeting with them for four and a half hours yesterday, I’m not sure they’re going to get done,” he said. “We have some issues we haven’t been able to work through, and I’m not turning that money loose until we do.”

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