A $26.7 million countywide emergency communications system is the cornerstone of a $42.2 million special purpose, local option sales tax package that will be on the ballot in November.

“Yes, it’s a lot of money,” Rome-Floyd County Fire Chief Gordon Henderson said. “But the technology we have now is almost 50 years old and was designed to work within the 15 square miles of Rome. If we had been upgrading it over the years, it would have cost less, but we’ve put it off too long.”

The Federal Communication Commission intends to cut the radio bandwidth — again — in 2013.

Public safety officials say it’s no longer possible to defer action, and the sensible option is to solve all the current problems at once with a system good for at least 20 years.

“It’s cheaper to (buy equipment for a narrower band), but we’d still have only one tower site. And it won’t address our coverage issues or interoperability,” said Scotty Hancock, director of the Floyd County Emergency Management Agency. “We don’t want any more bandaids. We need to fix it for the future.”

The proposed digital trunking system includes seven towers and numerous stand-alone antennas providing multiple routing options for signals. It is also APCO 25-compliant, which means it meets national standards to link with other systems and parts are available through multiple vendors.

Rome-Floyd County firefighters are all too familiar with the county’s numerous dead spots where radio communications are weak or blocked entirely, Henderson said. Signals are iffy in outlying areas, such as Armuchee or The Pocket, and in larger buildings.

“If you’re in Floyd Medical Center or some of the schools, you can’t communicate. You have to get to the command post outside and hope the mobile on the truck works,” he said. “We’re luckier than the police because we have more than one person responding. But if someone is stuck inside and can’t call out, we might not know until it’s too late.”

Floyd County Prison Warden Jeff Chandler said a lack of interoperability between the systems used by different agencies means the prison must borrow the Sheriff’s Office frequencies in case of an escape, in order to communicate with outside teams.

As a deputy, Chandler was first on the scene of the deadly tornado that hit the Wax community in March 2008.

His frustration is evident on 911 audio tapes as static repeatedly foiled his attempts to relay the information to dispatchers so they could pass it on to police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians.

“I saw the carnage that was before me, and I couldn’t get help to the people,” he said. “They finally told me to use my cell phone, but I had been through water-filled ditches and neither of them worked either. There were power lines down and arcing, gas leaks, people trapped in houses. The last thing we needed was transmission problems.”

Floyd County police Chief Bill Shiflett said his major concern is his officers’ inability to talk to multiple agencies by radio — especially in situations when city and county police coordinate efforts.

Chasing a suspect in a vehicle or on foot is one scenario. The March 4 hydrochloric acid spill at Bekaert Corp. is another.

“We were doing traffic control and evacuations, but we had no way of communicating with officers at certain locations,” Shiflett said. “We didn’t know which way they were sending traffic, which streets of residences were notified. It’s the same with the fire department and ambulance services from surrounding counties. It causes a lot of manpower and safety issues.”

Floyd County Sheriff Tim Burkhalter said he has to buy two types of radios for his deputies so they can communicate with different local agencies, although there are still problems when they must travel to outside counties to pick up prisoners.

But it’s the bad reception within the county borders that most troubles the sheriff, who said serving warrants is a dangerous job.

“I don’t serve warrants any more, but my guys do and they’re out in a lot of places where they need a radio that works,” Burkhalter said. “I remember having to call 911 on my phone to give them the address, and a time I’d be back in touch or they’d have to send the cavalry in.”

The proposed system would eliminate the need for two radios and a cell phone and allow seamless communication with any APCO 25-compliant agency in the nation, he said.

Click here to see a PDF of application and supporting documents.