Local agencies raise concerns about rollout
An eight-year project in Putnam County to replace an emergency communications system that has frustrated firefighters and police officers with static and garbled voices is nearly ready to go live.
County employees, sheriff’s deputies and police officers from Cold Spring and Brewster are testing the $13 million system. Tom Lannon, the county’s director of information technology and geographic information systems, provided an update on March 11 to the Legislature’s Protective Services Committee.
Fire departments in Brewster, Putnam Lake and Patterson and emergency medical services in Patterson will be the next first responders to have their radios programmed for the system. The system should be deployed to the rest of the county by May, Lannon said.
During tests, the system has “passed with flying colors,” he said, even without three towers that have yet to be erected at the Philipstown Highway Department garage, Airport Park in Mahopac and Piano Mountain in Putnam Valley.
Robert Lipton, a Philipstown resident who is the county’s emergency services commissioner, has the old low-band and new high-band radios in his car. He told legislators that, as he drove along Route 9 near the North Highlands Fire Department, the Carmel Fire Department received a dispatch.
“On low band, it was all garbled — every other word you could make out,” he said. “On the new radio, I could hear it perfectly clear.”
Full deployment has “been a slow process” as the county secured funding, Lannon said. State grants provided $6.4 million for the new towers and equipment and “as we got more grants, we were able to accelerate it.”
In 2023, the Philipstown Town Board agreed to allow Putnam to build a tower and building on 2,600 square feet at its highway garage for $1 annually for 35 years, but Lannon said the county is negotiating with the Open Space Institute, which has a conservation deed restriction on the property. “We have to give them property back to allow us to use that property, even though it’s owned by the Town of Philipstown,” he said.
Paul Jonke, the legislator who chairs the Protective Services Committee, and Legislator Erin Crowley, a member of the committee, each questioned Lannon and Lipton about a litany of concerns raised in letters from elected officials and first responders in Carmel, Mahopac, Putnam Valley and Southeast.
Some departments expressed concern about their ability to communicate under the new system with first responders in neighboring counties and Connecticut, and some claimed Putnam had given them the wrong radios.
Lannon said the county is replacing low-band pagers used by fire departments, which are no longer manufactured, with high-band pagers, but that it will continue to provide low-band paging with the new system. Lipton said departments need to clear channels to install the county settings into their radios. They can then reload their channels, he said.
Lipton added that, during testing, Putnam wants to use Motorola radios because allowing multiple manufacturers gets confusing. Once the system is cleared for countywide use, departments can deploy radios from other companies, although they will not have the capabilities available to Motorola users.
The county has been attempting to replace its system since 2016. In 2019 the Legislature approved a recommendation from its Radio Project Committee to spend up to $10 million with Motorola Solutions.
Under the old system, Lannon said, dispatchers and emergency personnel had to choose a tower to use; if they chose separate ones, their messages could be garbled. Communications were especially poor between eastern and western Putnam.
County officials highlighted the communication problems in 2020 after a man in Putnam Valley stabbed Deputy Sheriff Benjamin Levine in the arm, severing an artery. Levine tried to radio for help but could not connect, according to police officials. He survived after undergoing two surgeries.
Under the old system, first responders needed to manually select a frequency, which could lead to crosstalk. The new system automatically selects idle channels. “We’ve already heard back from police officers saying that now they can hear what’s going on — the village of Brewster can hear what’s going on in the Village of Cold Spring,” said Lannon. “We didn’t have that before.”
