Fire Chief

A couple years ago, my department was awarded a $300,000 Assistance to Firefighters Grant to upgrade our communications equipment. At that time our dispatch center, transmitter and antenna system all were 40 to 50 years old. It was designed to use a dedicated telephone line to carry audio from the dispatch console to the transmitter that was over a mile away on the city’s water tower. During rain or snowy weather, the telephone line often would ground out and the first notification of a problem was when our fire and EMS units would not acknowledge the run.

This past week, I attended one of the many Department of Homeland Security grant meetings held to assist departments with their 2008 AFG applications. The Region V facilitator, Lori Smith-Lonbom, and I discussed how difficult it was for some departments to express what they needed to secure an AFG for communications equipment.

The first and perhaps one of the most important items is to find someone within or closely associated with your department who understands communications, computers, software and interactive technology to design the concept of what you want and how it will operate. This individual should lay out the numbers and types of radios (base station, portables, mobiles); computers, including MDCs, software; and hardware, such as transmitters, antennas, coax, power supplies and an emergency generator; that you need to make this work.

If successful, your department generally will need to bid every item over $5,000 or whatever limit your locality requires. If there are GSA, state, county or joint bids in place, the equipment usually can be bought on contract from those vendors without a bid; but again follow what your city or fire district requires. For example, my city had a separate limit so even a purchase with grant money required the approval of city council.

This individual also should be relatively familiar with Federal Communications Commission regulations on licensing and alterations. For example, if you are already licensed to a radio frequency that you wish to maintain, you need to know the limitations of your transmitter’s output, the height of your antenna and the location where your transmitter is housed. If any of these are being changed, you first need to obtain the proper waivers from the FCC before starting the project.

Some tips for selling the project to the AFG reviewers include explaining how the current system does not fill your needs; how the new system will increase firefighter safety; how a new system will aid your neighbors; and how a new system will fit into the grand scheme of interoperability with your county, state and region. In our case, the new communications system allows us to run automatic aid with several surrounding communities. In the past it took one dispatcher to call another on the phone then re-dispatch the run for us, adding a minimum of two minutes to any automatic or mutual aid run. As we dispatched on another frequency altogether, none of our neighbors knew when or if we had gone in service. For a number of years it was easier for them just to bypass us for a farther-away department because they could communicate with them more directly.

Also remember to document everything. Any major grant award will be audited by the DHS. You need to keep all your records of your correspondence, invoices, purchase orders and matching funds clearly in a central location so they are open to inspection during the audit. Any item over $5,000 must be available to the auditor for a physical inspection including verifying serial numbers of each item. I can’t emphasize how important it is to keep accurate records, especially when you use multiple vendors and purchase orders.

Finally, expect and compensate for project delays. Ours came as a result of Hurricane Katrina, when emergency generators were diverted to those affected areas in the South, and we waited nearly two months longer than anticipated for its delivery and installation.

Good luck with your 2008 grant request, and if you have any questions about the process of requesting communications equipment, contact me through FIRE CHIEF and I’ll try to help.