Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Christmas came early to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) last week, in the form of a $1.2 million appropriation from the Florida Legislature.
On Thursday evening, June 3, Sheriff Mac McNeill informed the Jefferson County Commission that he had received word just the day before that the governor had signed off on a $1.2 million appropriation to his department for the purchase of a new radio communications system.
McNeill described the new system as a state-of-the-art upgrade that would allow his department, as well as the Jefferson County Fire and Rescue (JCFR), to be part of the Statewide Law Enforcement Radio System (SLERS), a unified digital radio network that allows interagency radio voice communications among participating agencies throughout Florida.
State agencies that utilize SLERS include the Florida Highway Patrol, Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, as well as local law-enforcement agencies in Leon and Taylor counties.
“We won’t have to get patched with the other agencies anymore, which is time consuming and not always successful,” McNeill said. “It will also fix the current system’s shortcoming, with coverage gaps that are a huge officer safety issue for us and our county’s Fire and Rescue.”
What’s more, if towers get knocked down during a storm, the SLERS has priority for returning to power. Whereas under the current scenario, McNeill said, if towers go down in a storm, the county is on its own.
The new system also, he said, would update the 911 network and the agency’s Computer Aided Dispatch System (CAD), allowing individuals to text distress messages to 911, and enhance the deputies abilities to do reports and interact with databases from their vehicles more efficiently, among things.
“It will bring us up to the 21st century and make the county safer,” McNeill said, noting that the present system dates from 1998.
In his remarks before the commission and later to the Monticello News, McNeill emphasized his gratitude to all who had participated to make the funding possible. His list is long and comprehensive. It includes the county commissioners for making the system the top legislative priority; Senator Loranne Ausley and Representative Jason Shoaf for backing the request in the legislature; Clerk of Court Kirk Reams for helping with the letter writing and other hoops that had to be jumped to justify the ask; NextEra for helping with the lobbying effort; and Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing the legislation.
“We all worked really hard to get this,” McNeill said, adding that it was rare for a county of Jefferson’s small size to get equipment of such high quality.
“When it passes that many filters, you know it was a needed thing,” he said of the county’s request.
McNeill also expressed gratitude to Fire Chief Derrick Burrus for his partnership and input on the technical selection process.
As for the existing equipment, McNeill said it was adequate to donate to other county departments for their use, notwithstanding the system’s gaps in remote areas that make it unacceptable for law enforcement and emergency purposes.
Too, he said, if the other departments did make use of the old system, the frequency could be recalibrated and tied to the new system, so that departments such as roads and others could communicate with the dispatch during storms and other emergency situations.
He said he expected the new system would be installed by November, if all went according to plan. It might also be, depending on the release of the state funding, that the county would have to put up some of the money upfront, he said. But the state would reimburse whatever costs the county fronted, he said.
The JCSO’s efforts to update its radio communications system predate McNeill’s tenure, but he became particularly involved in the process and has worked on it diligently since at least 2019, when he pressed the commission to adopt an emergency resolution supporting his department’s bid for a state grant to purchase a new system. That effort, which was tied to 2018’s Hurricane Michael, ultimately failed.
The department next tried to get the funding from other sources, including a federal grant, on which Langton Consulting and NextEra collaborated.
The effort to secure the funding from the Florida Legislature developed late last year, with the commission identifying the replacement of the system as its top legislative priority in the then-coming spring session, and appealing to Ausley and Shoaf to help secure the funding.
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