Citizens for Better Government Blount County Tennessee

Sheriff buys $4 million worth of digital radios – taxpayers get bludgeoned

The Blount County Commission did it again. At their August meeting, they decided, with little information or thought, to spend more than $4 million of taxpayer money, $2 million from the County and the balance from Maryville and Alcoa, on a new digital radio system for the Sheriff. You will remember the millions that were wasted each time the Commission made a decision on the County debt, with little understanding of what they were doing. The Commission’s digital radio decision will likely result in a similar waste of taxpayer money.

There are a number of very disturbing loose ends with this digital radio deal.

• Among other things, the Sheriff bought 35 car radios at $3021 each, 200 portables at $3366 ea., 5 car radios at $3015ea, and 130 portables at $2886 ea.. This is a grand total of 365 radios for $1.1 million. The Sheriff has a total of 280 employees, including clerical and food service. More than 365 radios for less than 250 people who could ever need one, and more than half of them are off shift and sleeping at any given time!
• The Commission was told they had to act quickly because the Motorola state contract is running out. But the existing state contract, negotiated in 2006, had been extended to the end of October, so there was no need to act immediately.
• In fact, waiting a few months would have saved us a great deal of money. The old contract was negotiated in 2006 when there were few suppliers of the digital radios the Sheriff wanted to buy. Today, Motorola, Harris, EFJohnson, Cisco, Infocomm, and Raytheon all make these radios. And these radios are digital not analog. Moore’s law applies to digital equipment. Moore’s law says the price of a given set of digital functions comes down by roughly half every two years. Lower prices are the good news.
• Moores law also means functions can double every two years. That means obsolescence will be a major consideration in the future. The proposed radios are likely to be obsolete long before the County’s 10-year lease purchase payments are completed. How many of you are using the cell phone you had 10 years ago?
• The state contract administrator told us that he is negotiating a new contract for the kind of radios the Sheriff purchased. He expects the new contract to go into effect in November. He said he expected the new contract to offer significantly lower prices, because of the large number of competitors now making digital radios.
• His opinion is confirmed by a review of other states’ contracts for these radios. Other states are getting significantly lower prices than the County received, and two year warranties versus the one year the County got.
• New radios raise the possibility of gaps in coverage where radio signals cannot be received. Other municipalities are getting coverage guarantees, something that is glaringly absent from the Blount County Sheriff’s deal. The Sheriff has not even done the study to assure the coverage of the new system will be adequate. Without this study and coverage guarantees, the County taxpayers may well be facing the need for the construction of expensive new towers in the near future.

The Sheriff chose not to wait a few months for the new State contract that could enable us to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. He elected not to do the studies to give us a real coverage map for our new system. Why bother? He will just come back to the taxpayers when he needs more money.

Call the Sheriff. Ask him why he was in such a hurry to give this gift of taxpayer money to his friends at Motorola.