SOUTHWICK — The town’s Capital Expenditure Committee, which typically meets when the annual budget is being developed in late winter, met Wednesday and unanimously approved a public safety request of $220,000 to complete an update of its communication systems.
“This is a radio system for the future, and it is going to provide us in public safety the frequency coverage that we need [and] the radio coverage that we need,” said Fire Chief Richard Stefanowicz during the committee meeting.
Where the money will come from will be decided by the Select Board working with the town’s Finance Committee before it is presented as an article on the warrant for the Jan. 13 Special Town Meeting. It could be borrowed or withdrawn from the town’s Stabilization Fund.
Since the town partnered with Westfield to create the Westfield Regional Public Safety Communication Center about three years ago, it’s been slowly updating and upgrading its town-wide communications systems, which include components ranging from radio towers to the portable radios carried by police and fire.
Originally, Stefanowicz said designing and building the system was estimated to cost about $2 million, but Regional Dispatch Director Nina Barszcz, who he said was a very successful grant writer, was able to secure incentive and development grants, dropping the cost to nearly $1.695 million.
The State 911 Department kicked in another $1.4 million, which created the funding gap.
“There’s just a little bit of a gap,” Stefanowicz said about the $220,000 requested.
He said the equipment the town needs to purchase is called a backhaul, which is the backbone of a mobile network.
Reserve Police Officer Michael Girard explained that a backhaul synchronizes all the radio transmissions.
He said the town has four nodes — which receive and send transmissions — for its system, and that all are connected by what are essentially copper telephone cables used to provide telephone service to homes.
“Verizon has pretty much at this point stopped servicing [those lines],” Girard said, adding that the lines are prone to fail.
But because the nodes are hardwired, if, for example, a car crashed into a nearby utility pole that carried the cable, public safety radio communications in that area would be lost.
“[Let’s say] we lost the southern end receiver where our emergency personnel are going. So, not only are they dealing with that emergency that caused the outage of the radio system, the radio system’s not working there for them,” Girard said.
Not only are the copper lines antiquated, but Verizon also just told the town it would stop servicing those lines no later than January 2027, he said.
There was another challenge — when the company that won the contract to build the system was in the design phase, it found the nodes could not be connected wirelessly with the town’s current equipment because line-of-sight between the nodes is required.
It was determined that the radio tower at Juniper Road needed to be taller so that line-of-sight was achieved between the nodes and to the regional dispatch center in Westfield — that node is on Sodom Mountain.
Girard said the state provided another grant for the taller tower, but it was about $67,000 less than the cost to build it. Westfield kicked that amount.
Once the communication system is completed, the DPW will also be using the network with radios repurposed from the Police and Fire departments.
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