The Door County Board of Supervisors last week approved a $3.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The money will be used to defray the costs of an anticipated $25 million countywide public safety communication upgrade project.
Municipal and county law enforcement and emergency services communicate with each other via the current analog system. It is yet to be determined how much of the cost of the project will be shared by individual departments and municipalities.
It is an award the board has known about and anticipated since last March, said county administrator Ken Pabich, but it was not officially awarded until October.
Established as part of the Department of Justice in 1994, Community Oriented Policing Services provides funding for projects that advance the practice of community policing, according to their website. Door County received its $3.9 million through technology and equipment program grants available from Community Oriented Policing Services.
The last full system upgrade occurred in 2013 and most of the current communication and radio tower infrastructure will reach end-of-life in 2028, according to a review in October 2020 by Len Koehnen, the county’s consulting engineer at the time. Koehnen has since retired, and Omnicon Consulting Group is the current consulting agent for the project.
The 2013 upgrade was in response to a narrowbanding mandate imposed by the Federal Communications Commission. Narrowbanding refers to the analog radio channel being divided in half, allowing more users on each channel, Greg Diltz explained. Diltz has served on the county’s communication advisory technical subcommittee for decades and owned Northern Door Communications for 20 years before retiring in 2022.
The narrowbanding upgrade was mostly paid for by a grant, according to Diltz, and another grant was acquired to switch from a multicast to a simulcast system a few years later. Simulcasting allows all 19 Door County municipalities to broadcast the same signal across multiple overlapping sites on the same radio frequency, at the same time, without interference.
Before that upgrade, if a portable radio user in Sister Bay wanted to reach a Washington Island responder, the signal would have to switch towers to get from there to there, Diltz said.
The latest project is an effort to upgrade the county’s analog system to an 800 megahertz digital radio system.
“The legacy system we have had since the 1970s is a VHF analog system, not digital,” Diltz said, and the only mandate for this most recent upgrade is the movement of technology itself.
“There is no mandate from the FCC or any government body to change, but all the companies basically stopped making analog-only radios,” he said. “ICOM, the company I represent, only offers one analog mobile now. There were several models a few years ago.”
Other counties jumped at the more expensive analog/digital hybrid radios when the large radio companies told them they would need this technology, according to Diltz, but Door County public safety departments and municipalities have been “extremely frugal,” buying whatever they can new and buying used equipment as well.
“We could’ve gone to digital ten years ago,” Diltz said. “No one is forcing us. Now we’re doing it, switching from analog to digital.”
It will mean spending millions of dollars, but Door County has spent relatively little over the years to maintain a system that provides good radio communication countywide, he added.
Phase one of the project was approved by the county board in February 2024 after making its way through the judicial and public safety committee, and the communications advisory technical subcommittee.
The project is a countywide rehab of all communications used by public safety entities, including fire departments, EMS, police departments and the Wisconsin Department of National Resources, according to Joel Gunnlaugsson. Gunnlaugsson is the supervisor for District 21, representing Liberty Grove and Washington Island and is chair of the judiciary and public safety committee.
There are more entities than those in public safety that use the communication system currently, he added, such as local highway departments and school bus operators.
“There are a lot of hands in the pot that need to be able to talk to each other when s*** hits the fan,” Gunnlaugsson said.
How much each stakeholder, including municipalities, will need to pay for the upgrade is unclear right now, he said.
New portable radios, pagers, vehicle radios and other communication devices are costly and numerous, Gunnlaugsson said, and the question is, should the county pay for all this?
“I don’t think the county will stick all of it to townships,” he said, but there are a lot of variables that will need to be managed and worked out as the project progresses.
Time to acquire land for towers and perform more engineering studies, and exactly what kind of equipment will support the technology are all factors in how the project will be paid for and how the costs will be assigned, Gunnlaugsson said.
The communications advisory technical subcommittee reviewed and approved a plan proposed by Omnicon to use existing infrastructure, which consists of four county-owned towers and eight co-locations, including several partnerships with NSight Communications. The plan would add six new build sites and two additional co-location sites to upgrade the system. The three phases of the project are estimated to cost $25 million total and be completed by 2028.