By Audrey Posten
Clayton County’s new 911 communications project is ready to go—the culmination of a multi-year process to evaluate and replace the aged public safety and radio paging system that Clayton County 911 Coordinator Samantha Rumph said has outlived its life.
“We’re moving right along,” Rumph told the Clayton County Board of Supervisors at a Dec. 4 meeting. “We turned the system on a couple weeks ago. We’re in the 30-day burn in right now, making sure everything is happy and functioning the way it’s supposed to. Doing some testing on our own. There’s a plan for cutover to the system at the end of January.”
The current system is more than 20 years old, and does not provide reliable coverage throughout the county, according to Rumph. Finding parts when equipment breaks has also become increasingly difficult.
“We kept putting a band aid here and band aid there. It got to the point where we needed parts and we had to go on eBay to try to find a part to fix our paging. That’s ridiculous,” explained Dean Courtnage, vice chair of the Clayton County E-911 Board.
The county began looking at upgrades when Rumph started her position in 2021. The Clayton County E-911 Board contracted with MCM Consulting Group, Inc. in January 2022 to evaluate the existing system and identify needs, improvements and opportunities for replacement of the infrastructure.
RACOM was selected to design a replacement system that meets public safety standards for reliability and performance and will provide law enforcement, fire and emergency medical services a public safety communications network for a considerable time to come.
The new P25 radio system will utilize sites in the McGregor, Elkader and Guttenberg areas, and also has equipment at a tower site in Dubuque County and a newly built tower at the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office. Rumph said the paging system includes nine sites in McGregor, Monona, Elkader, Volga, Garber, Garnavillo, Guttenberg, Strawberry Point and the sheriff’s office.
The roughly $7.5 million project is funded by a bond as well as E-911 funds, according to Rumph.
She said land acquisition and working with the FCC, FAA and historic preservation provided some challenges. So did the current aged system, which has been fixed rather than maintained over the years, necessitating structural analysis, tower reinforcements and new generators.
“Some expenses that were incurred are what I would call overdue expenses from our current system that pushed into our new system. Like, you put new equipment on that tower, but you never did a structural analysis. Well, now we’ve got to do one. So the old system kind of forced those changes,” said Joe Zittergruen, chair of the E-911 Board.
Through it all, “I’ve worked very hard to be conscious with the money,” Rumph told the supervisors. “This is the very best system that our money could buy. I think you’re going to be very pleased.”
Moving forward, maintenance will be prioritized. Rumph said a 10-year maintenance agreement will cover hardware and software refreshes, and it’s hoped the system could sustain years past that.
“Now you’re going to have a whole new system you can just take care of,” she said. “It’s like getting a new car, right? Get a new car, you take care of it, it stays nice. If you do the maintenance and you do the upgrades and you replace things as you need them, you’re not overhauling a whole new system every 10 years.”
Added Zittergruen, “The technology will obviously change and the equipment you’re using to operate, it will change, but if we’ve got a 10-year maintenance contract and in three years there’s a newer technology and this piece of equipment needs to be replaced, you upgrade it. As you go, you’re upgrading things instead of saying seven years down the road, ‘Oh, we’ve got to gut the whole works and start from scratch.’”
The public safety paging and radio system will greatly improve coverage and communication for responders, aiding safety of law enforcement, fire and EMS as well as the Clayton County citizens and visitors they serve. It will also improve interoperability between neighboring counties and emergency responders.
Rumph and Zittergruen said early use already shows vast improvement. As an example, Rumph played two audio clips captured inside the cinder block wall showers of the locker room at the MFL MarMac Middle School in McGregor. The old system was static, while the new one had clear voices.
Zittergruen saw similar results while standing inside the boiler room at Clayton Ridge and conducting a radio check with a deputy in a vehicle on Highway 18.
“That’s not a guaranteed coverage in our [new] contract, but we got it,” he shared. “The new radio system, in some spots, is stronger than what they even predicted.”
“Of course, it’s not always going to be 100%, right? There’s gonna always be dead spots,” Rumph acknowledged. But she’s excited to see the improvements and for the project to finally reach the finish line.
“This is a big deal for safety for everybody,” she said.
