Police to Purchase Radios for Better Communication

Despite a concern that the information was not available to the public prior to the Feb. 7 meeting, the township council unanimously approved a resolution to allow the township police department to purchase radio equipment through a New Jersey Department of Homeland Security grant.

“We have begun the process of purchasing multi-band radios,” said Bridgewater Township Police Chief Richard Borden. “We were prepared to do this now because the grant runs out in March of this year. The purchase transition has to be made by that date.”

But council president Howard Norgalis, though expressing his support for the resolution, said he wished information could have been provided to the public prior to the Friday before the meeting when the information was made available.

“The vexing thing is we had a council meeting the Thursday before, and I heard nothing about this,” he said. “It limits our availability to get our information out on the website, and may give the appearance we are trying to hide something.”

“From a practical standpoint, we have strict rules about getting information available and posting it to the website,” he added. 

Still, as approved in the resolution, the contract is for $188,873.35 to Motorola Inc. for the purchase of mobile and portable communications equipment, with the entire cost being funded by a Buffer Zone Protection Program grant through Homeland Security. 

Borden said it took a while for the department to determine it was applying to get radios that would last.

“It was time-consuming because of the unknown and the timeline with going to the county,” he said. “This went on for a few months, and we were looking for some kind of direction of where we were going with this. We didn’t want to waste money on radios that may be antiquated in a year or two.”

The grant itself, Borden said, was offered by Homeland Security, and was not something the department solicited.

The purchase will include 50 dual band portable radios with trunking capabilities and one dual head UHF mobile radio, as well as equipment and labor to install the radio in the dispatch center.

According to the resolution information, the dual band radios will be programmed with the county and Bridgewater’s five different fire companies.

“We reached a decision after working on the best compromise to get multi-band radios so the compatibility is there for the county, and for our own officers,” Borden said. “This decision was made in September, but we had to wait to hear the best way to go with the money available.”

When the department first applied for radios, Borden said, Homeland Security rejected the proposal just three weeks ago because the radios did not meet the interoperability portion of the requirements, so it was back to the drawing board.

“Then we had to reach out to Motorola vendors to get a new solicitation, and then resubmit that for approval, which brings us to tonight,” he said. “We received the approval Feb. 3.”

The radios are expected have a life expectancy of about 20 years, but the police department acknowledged they may not actually last that long.