When Essex Rescue volunteer Dan Manz was called out to the August 2006 Essex school shooting, the ambulance radio was abuzz with confusion. “There were victims at the school,” he recalls, “then one fatality in a residential neighborhood, then another person shot and we had a report of an injury on another person who turned out to be the shooter. They were sending ambulances all over. It got incredibly busy and hectic on our dispatch frequency.” Complexity multiplied as other agencies rolled in to assist. “We called in adjacent neighbors. South Burlington sent over a truck to cover in case another call came in while we were all out with this incident, and in fact there was one. So our dispatch is sending us hither and yon and can hardly get a word in edgewise to dispatch South Burlington.”

Photo Courtesy of the Colchester Rescue Squad.

The problem was too much information sent over too few airwaves. But channel crowding is only a small part of the problems on Vermont’s emergency communications airwaves. Vermont’s tough terrain, international boundary, and traditionally divergent frequency patterns make interagency communications difficult even in non-emergency situations. With a $7.5 million 2006 Homeland Security grant, the Vermont Communications Board (VCOMM) is trying to build a statewide interoperability solution. Skeptical emergency service providers, compelled to give up their local share of the federal grant money to buy into the state-led program, are giving the project static.

Interagency communications became a national priority after the 9-11 Commission found the inability of police, fire, and ambulance services to talk to one another contributed to firefighters’ deaths in the 2001 World Trade Center collapse. The Vermont Department of Public Safety formed a Communications Study Committee, which paid a private consultant $400,000 in 2005 federal grant dollars to come up with a solution. They proposed a massive new infrastructure system “costing 300 million bucks and having 11 new towers,” says VCOMM Chair, Newport Police Chief Paul Duquette. “We decided we needed to come up with a solution that actually worked for Vermont.”

The resulting Vermont Communications Board—VCOMM—was formed via executive order by Governor Jim Douglas on June 5, 2006. VCOMM membership comprises representatives from a wide variety of first responders. However, federal Department of Homeland Security communications grants are disbursed with two catches: first, the money must go to a single, state entity for distribution. VCOMM, as an ad-hoc board, doesn’t qualify, so funds must be channeled through the Department of Public Safety. Secondly, Homeland Security mandates that at least 80 percent of federal communications grant monies be distributed to local or nonprofit emergency service providers. While local agencies bristle at the specter of state police control of their federal funds, developing a statewide program required all of the organizations in the state (except the Vermont Professional Firefighters, which opted out) to sign Memorandums of Understanding waiving their local share back into a pooled pot. Now discontent over the project and its administration diminishes the odds that first responders will agree to future waivers which would be necessary to build and operate the project.

Running out of Real Estate

With part of the $7.5 million in 2006 federal grant money, VCOMM is shouldering the cost of reprogramming local agency radios to receive eight new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved tactical communications channels. Half a million dollars was designated for equipment purchases, to ensure all departments have equipment to carry new tactical channels. The remaining [roughly] $6 million is earmarked as seed money for statewide radio system infrastructure—base stations, repeaters, and possibly new towers—though its ultimate design and cost remains unknown.

Reprogramming radios to add the new channels is welcomed by most first responders. “Part of the problem with emergency communications generally is real estate,” says Manz, whose day job is Director of Emergency Medical Services, the EMS co-ordination unit within the Vermont Department of Health. The FCC designates which radio frequencies are allotted to every radio user, from music stations to amateur and CB radio to emergency communications. For local fire trucks, police, and ambulances, a limited spectrum of frequencies is authorized, though it proves enough to handle the ordinary daily course of running one ambulance at a time in any given area.

But consider a slightly bigger incident where neighboring emergency service providers are called to assist. “Most commonly if Town A is going to Town B to help, they go to Town B’s frequency. And that works kind of okay with one agency helping,” Manz says. “Move to a larger incident, involving twenty agencies, they don’t even know my frequency and don’t have it programmed into their radio. You’ve run out of real estate.”

The new federal channels expand that real estate. “In the future,” Manz explains, “instead of switching to our frequency, they all switch to a VCOMM channel. It allows the dispatch channel to remain open, it allows the medical channel to the hospital to remain open.” The new channels allow different emergency-scene tasks—for example, coordination of water and hoses, triage of injured victims, and directing traffic around a fire—to be each assigned their own frequency. And because the new channels are nation-wide, Vermont emergency service providers volunteering for Hurricane relief in a distant state—out-of-state ambulances and fire trucks coming to Vermont’s aid in some future disaster—can now talk to each other.

“If we’d of had the VCOMM frequencies, it would have been so orderly,” Manz says of the Essex school shooting. “Not that it crumbled, but it would have been easier.”

While programming radios for the new federal channels is useful, it requires only a small fraction of the 2006 federal grant money. Turning the remaining six million dollars back to VCOMM meant dozens of dedicated, budget-starved volunteer and professional emergency responders had to give up their own high-priority projects.

“People had started building out their radio system and now there’s no money to do that because it’s going to VCOMM,” says Doug Johnston, Springfield Police Chief and Chair of the VCOMM Organizational Committee. “Some feathers are ruffled. For an example now, we [Springfield Police Department] are getting a new facility, and we could use a new emergency generator, video equipment and security systems, and ordinarily I’d apply through Homeland Security and it would be on their approved equipment list, but now the funding isn’t there, it’s all gone to VCOMM.”

The sense of urgency regarding that list of locally-needed projects is exacerbated by two radio licensing problems: the need for Canadian approval, and a new FCC initiative called Nnarrowbanding.”

Narrowbands and National Boundaries

While licenses are not required for mobile emergency radios, all base station radios at police headquarters, dispatch centers, and antennae tower sites have to be licensed by the FCC for every channel they use—including each of the eight new FCC-issued channels. While this licensing process is onerous in itself, for those agencies inside a geopolitical fiction called the “A-line” roughly 75 to 100 miles from the border, licensing also requires Canadian approval.

“Canada usually denies it, and then you have to negotiate,” explains J. Paul Duquette, Newport Police Chief and Chair of the VCOMM Steering Committee. “They don’t have frequency regulation as defined as the U.S., so you actually have trucking companies and taxis on the same bandwidth as Vermont first responders. We’ll be talking at an accident scene or fire and some Canadian taxi will cut in.”

“The Canadians are taking advantage, and a small town with volunteer emergency service people doesn’t have the resources and the time to fight it,” says Ron Kumetz, radio engineer, proprietor of Falcon Communications, and former chair of the VCOMM technical committee.

A handful of other Vermont towns like Shoreham still operate on red “fire phones” that ring in firefighter’s homes when a departmental phone number is called—systems that will remain operable only until the phone companies dwindling box of spare parts used to fix them runs out. But all radio equipment in Vermont that is more than a few years old, will soon be as obsolete as fire phones, because of an FCC mandate called “narrowbanding.”

Radio channels occupy a chunk of space on the radio dial called a “bandwidth.” That bandwidth has long been 25 MHz. As of 2013, the FCC will cut all channels down to half that width, or 12.5 MHz wide, on the theory of fitting twice as many channels in half the space. New radios are manufactured to work within the narrower bandwidths, but older equipment, including critical firefighter’s alert pagers, will require complete replacement.

“Fire departments in this state will have to replace 5000 pagers at $400 a piece. VCOMM took the Homeland Security money that departments would have been able to use to get some of this equipment they need,” Kumetz says.”This whole thing is a fiasco. It’s $6.5 million that my brother firefighters could put to better use.”

Kumetz served for two years as the Vermont State Firefighters Association representative on the VCOMM Steering Committee, but was then asked to step down. VCOMM officials cited a conflict of interest with his radio repair business, but Kumetz notes wryly that it was “shortly after I pointed out they were spending money on things they didn’t need.”

King of the Network

Neil Fulton, Norwich Fire Chief and member of VCOMM since its inception, was also awkwardly removed from the board after voicing disagreement over the project’s focus. But there are “no hard feelings,” he is quick to assure. “The state can have whoever it wants on its committee,” backhandedly underscoring a wide-held perception that the Vermont State Police have absconded with VCOMM for their agency’s own special interests.

Terry LaValley, VCOMM co-chair and Communications Program Manager for the Vermont Department of Public Safety, admits a chief obstacle has been a “perception that somebody wants to be king of the network.” Criticisms have focused on mobile data—roadside fingerprint scanners and criminal records database access of little use to anyone outside State Police—as well as expensive radio components like combiners, devices that allow multiple radios to use the same antennae. “What was coming back to us is that ‘you want to put the state antennas on those,’” LaValley says, “But they are simply reserving a port so that in the future, when local agencies want to join on to that tower, they can simply plug their radios in without going through Act 250.We’re already getting a lot of requests for these.”

Fulton says it all comes down to the state agencies and local emergency service providers having “a difference of opinion as to what’s needed.” One key point of contention is whether VCOMM adequately addresses the far-and-away top concern of all emergency responders in Vermont: coverage. “Coverage” is the footprint of area where a radio’s signals can be heard. Vermont’s bumpy terrain and thick forest cover make airwave communications coverage extremely difficult.

Bristol Rescue EMT Howie McCausland, computer networking guru for Middlebury College by day, describes a typical coverage problem: “With a single receiver system, the handhelds we have transmit at five watts. They are like a flashlight. They transmit on a frequency we don’t actually receive. That frequency hits the repeater which retransmits at 100 watts on another adjoining frequency, and that can be heard everywhere. But there are places where mountains are in the way so we can’t reach the repeater. I can be seeing an ambulance coming a mile down the road, but we can’t talk to them because the signal can’t reach the repeater.”

McCausland doubts that any infrastructure short of a massive web of new towers would resolve this difficulty, and dozens of repeater towers create their own difficulties, such as the echoes when you try to talk on a cell phone in much of the state—not to mention an inevitable wave of public opposition to new tower construction. “It’s just something you live with in EMS business, like the fact that puke smells bad,” he says. “Communications are always a mess in a disaster.”

VCOMM chair Duquette says the current “lifeline” plan to put a series of about 30 repeaters—radios that receive a signal and then re-transmit them on down the line—on existing Vermont tower sites will resolve the coverage issues. “There may be need in the future for some new towers to fill in the holes, but we’re looking now at existing sites,” he says. “That should eliminate holes in the terrain.”

But Neil Fulton says the VCOMM lifeline won’t improve coverage or interoperability.

With Vermont law enforcement traditionally using one set of radio channels (UHF, or ultra high frequency), and fire and EMS on another (VHF, or very high frequency) “there’s no more interoperability with the new channels than there was before,” Fulton says. “The money being spent to reprogram the radios is being well spent, but the result is different from functional inter-operability as first responders understand it. As a fire chief, I have to carry around two radios, one for VHF and one for UHF, and that means my problems are compounded. Here I am in the middle of a situation, and I have two radios to deal with. In a truly interoperable system, dispatch handles that connectivity. It’s a one-microphone solution.”

For Fulton’s Norwich department, interoperability also means the ability to communicate easily with New Hampshire agencies. “Hanover is just as important to me as Bethel,” he says. “I’m convinced that if you gave this region its appropriate share of that $7.5 million, we would do a more effective job of resolving our needs for coverage and interoperability.”

User Fees and Special Interests

To date, the Vermont Legislature has not chipped in at all to the VCOMM project, so Homeland Security funds remain the sole source of foreseeable revenue. These funds will continue to funnel through the Department of Public Safety, and forward progress will require the local emergency service providers to turn their 80 percent of the funds back to the VCOMM pool each year. Local dissatisfaction with this administrative arrangement means the project’s future is in jeopardy.

“If the first responder community is not convinced that VCOMM’s project is solving the problems they identified, then where is the source of funds for ongoing operations going to be?” asks Fulton, expressing a sentiment voiced by many of Vermont’s local emergency agencies, which are ordinarily wary of publicly voicing criticism of the Department of Public Safety.

“The Chiefs of Police interest is to have an independent board to report to the legislature,” says Doug Johnston, who serves as representative of the Vermont Chiefs of Police Association on the VCOMM board. The state’s E-9-1-1 board runs independently of the Department of Public Safety, a successful model that many first responders would like to see followed with VCOMM. “We want an independent board, because then you have an objective set of people running it, and you have more say in what goes on. It creates a level playing field for everybody and decisions will be made objectively and not representing special interests,” Johnston says.

Lamoille Sheriff Roger Marcoux agrees, but he’s more optimistic than the police chiefs that a legislatively-created independent body will be formed. “I’ve been assured that there’s no interest in a Department of Public Safety takeover and they would favor an independent board,” he says. “I’m putting a lot of time into this with the assumption that it will happen in the future.”

That future will have to be imminent to assure VCOMM’s viability. Shrinking federal grant dollars will soon intersect with construction and maintenance costs. Constructing an upgraded statewide radio system is only the beginning of ongoing operational expenses. “We are trying to find sustainability funding,” says Duquette. “There may be some kind of organizational users fee in the future, we don’t know. The state share of Department of Homeland Security money keeps going down every year.”

The suggestion that local agencies would turn their local share money back to the state only to be charged a user fee to access the system they paid to build, increases first responders’ squawking about state agency lording over the system. But in the face of funding silence from the state legislature, Johnston unhappily echoes the sound of fading federal dollars. “Leahy has been excellent at trying to keep small states in the loop, but that Homeland Security money is shrinking,” he says. “Maintenance for the first year is covered on the equipment purchase contracts, but then you inherit the costs.” Unless those costs are covered, VCOMM’s federally funded investments will be for naught.

VCOMM’s state police members voice an optimism that is missing from the small firehouses, police stations, and ambulance squads around the state. “VCOMM is made up of a lot of good people—and it is truly their system,” LaValley says. “They are the ones that will control it. There’s not a lot of opportunities in funding that will come along, and we need to get along to make use of those funds whenever they present themselves. This is Vermont, we need to all work together.” Which means the Vermont Department of Public Safety and local emergency service providers will need to be on the same channel.

Cindy Ellen Hill is an attorney in Middlebury.