Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan accused Montgomery County officials of “standing in the way” of approving a site for a radio tower that provides communications among police, firefighters and other first responders.
Hogan cited the recent 14-hour communications outage over Mother’s Day weekend that left firefighters using workarounds to communicate with each other as an illustration of the seriousness of the problem.
In a statement released Wednesday, Hogan said firefighters had raised concerns that the current system is “at grave risk of catastrophic failure.”
The office of Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich released a statement in response.
“The County Executive is committed to doing everything possible to ensure that the people of Montgomery County are safe,” the statement reads. “Every action that he has taken to improve the public safety communication system over the last few months has been done with a sense of urgency and concern for public safety. This administration inherited a County public safety communications system that is over 20 years old and long overdue for an upgrade.”
Members of Montgomery County’s firefighters union had sent a letter to Hogan outlining their concerns earlier this month.
In a county council work session Tuesday, members of the Montgomery County Council’s Government Operations and Public Safety Committees expressed frustration over delays in updating the county’s communications system, which has been due for a $45 million dollar upgrade.
The county had been working on updating its radio communications system for over a decade.
A $45 million dollar plan included establishing 22 towers across the county that would tie police, fire and emergency services together. The system would serve corrections and municipal police departments, as well. State agencies would also make use of one of the towers.
The project ran into community opposition for towers in two areas: one in Olney and another in the Breton Woods community.
Those community complaints prompted Elrich to look for alternative sites. At Tuesday’s work session, legislative analyst Susan Farag said that as of Tuesday, “No alternate site has been pinned down or approved.”
Farag told the council committee members that during the 14-hour outage on Mother’s Day, instead of having the usual 16 channels of communications open to them, first responders had an average eight channels available.
She said that while on any given day in the current system, there can be 1-2 “busy” signals a month; during the Mother’s Day weekend outage, there were 600 “busy” signals lasting up to two minutes in some cases.
During Tuesday’s session, Council member Hans Riemer said, “We need to put the two towers back on the table.” Riemer acknowledged that the two sites had produced complaints from area residents, and that the previous site selection process was flawed. But, “The train has left the station. There’s very little room for adjustment at this point,” Riemer said.
Montgomery County police Capt. Dinesh Patil told council members that the police are considering workarounds until the issue of the communications upgrades are solved. He told the committee members, “At the end of the day, we really just need tools that work.”
