Editor’s note: At present dispatching for emergency services – police, fire, etc. – is handled by several larger municipalities, each with their own system, and elsewhere by the Vermont State Police. Training, standards, equipment and practices, and quality of service vary widely.

State and local officials and the Legislature recognized the potential for an emergency services communication disaster several years ago and appropriated study money. Steven Whitaker, a longtime volunteer citizen advocate on issues of communications, has been following this issue closely. His assessment below, and especially his views on the actions taken by the people involved, reflects his point of view alone. But based on many conversations I’ve had with him at the State House in recent years, I believe he is at least well-informed. The recap he provides below is at least a good start in understanding this problem notable – as with most state-regulated telecommunications – for both its regulatory and technical complexity.

One of the great tragedies of 911 was a breakdown of coordinated emergency communications between the NYPD and the NYFD. Before September 11, some people “in the know” knew the risk but failed to follow through. VDC plans to cover the state’s handling of the public safety dispatch problem as it seeks to prevent a Vermont-scale emergency services disaster from ever happening.

by Stephen Whitaker

How did we get in this Dispatch mess?

There was language in the Appropriations Bill in 2022 that created the Regional Dispatch Workgroup. 

That group, chaired by Barre Town First Selectman, retired VSP Captain Paul White, met almost weekly for six months. They produced the December 1, 2022 report. 

That December report acknowledged that the Workgroup did not accomplish everything that the legislation had asked for, and said, in effect, “Here’s where you need to go. Here’s what you need to look at.” “To be done right, we need to take a comprehensive approach.”

Senate GovOps committee in 2023 crafted a committee bill. Not all of it is on the record unfortunately. They took a lot of testimony but a whole lot of the bill’s particulars were done off the record behind closed doors. 

It then went to the Finance Committee. Finance has jurisdiction over telecommunications issues and Public Safety Communications IS clearly telecommunications. They started finding problems with the bill. Lots of problems in fact, including with the funding formula which was going to saddle all of the yet unknown costs onto municipalities and that was viewed as untenable. 

So the bill ran aground in Senate Finance. And GovOps chair Ruth Hardy said she wanted it back. And Finance chair Cummings told her “It doesn’t work that way.” So they argued and they went to the Senate President Pro Tem’s office several times. I don’t think the Pro Tem even understood the issues. He just knew he had two chairs fighting over a bill. Appropriations committee chair Jane Kitchel was there and said something to the effect of “We’ll just put some language in the budget.” 

So included in the 2023 budget bill in section C.114 is language creating the Public Safety Communications Task Force. These are broad outlines of the vision of a uniform Statewide, Interoperable, Resilient Public Safety Communications infrastructure — A system of systems that will make sure all calls for help are handled reliably and uniformly, even if a dispatch center completely fails instantly. 

So that’s also where the $11M and the $9M Appropriations happened. The $11 million GF had already been appropriated in a prior year and still was not spent. It is General Funds. The $11M had been appropriated the previous year to the Department of Public Safety for enhancements to regional dispatch capacity to address severe staff shortages at the two Public Safety Answering Points run by the State Police. 

Commissioner of Public Safety at the time, Michael Schirling, proposed to just shovel the $11M at a dozen or so unplanned projects. 

Commissioner Schirling was going to give out grants with a “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach to building more dispatch capacity. The thinking was that he could try to force the non-paying town customers off of his VSP dispatch centers. Yet he had no legal authority to do so — to basically cease having the state police dispatching for towns. 

The towns would theoretically be coerced or misled somehow to sign up with some regional dispatch enterprise for a big fee, meaning hundreds or even thousands of dollars monthly, big numbers annually, with one of these new or expanded Regional Dispatch Centers. 

What the GovOps and Finance Committees learned, after Schirling was replaced by Commissioner Jennifer Morrison is that both state and regional governance are essential yet still missing. Who’s going to have a vote in how the dispatching rates are set? Will the towns own a share of the radio infrastructure, or will they be a captive customer to an enterprise with no choice to go anywhere else? Who conceals or investigates dispatch errors, sometimes even deadly errors? These are the kinds of crucial issues related to governance still unresolved.

Other crucial issues are LMR Resiliency but uniquely, the report and the bill included a recognition that LTE, meaning cellular voice and data, is also important, and even essential, both for the public to be able to call for help in the first place and for First Responders to be able to provide modern services and to communicate vitals, pre-arrival, with healthcare facilities.

First Responders can no longer get by with just traditional two-way radio, which in Vermont still has plenty of dead zones where radios don’t work. They now need broadband data service WITH PRIORITY AND PREEMPTION. This is because all the new tools for Public Safety response, including camera drones, Fire Ground management apps on a tablet, automatic vehicle location, mapping and Computer Aided Dispatch, (CAD) all require wireless LTE broadband on a cell phone, a tablet, or in a vehicle. 

So the starting point of the public safety communications planning process is to inventory all existing systems, and to map all the dead zones in both cellular and LMR radio coverage. 

LMR is an acronym for Land Mobile Radio. Those systems use licensed frequencies on portables and vehicle radios. LMR supports Public Safety, public works and utilities today and has been for many many years. And probably LMR will continue as primary communications for another decade or two.

Did the  2023 Task Force actually do any of that work? They have not done a damn thing in six months except hold 60 odd meetings, avoid addressing critical policy issues and be led around by the  nose by the co-chairs, both of whom have conflicts of interest, Barb Neal’s being the cell database; Jen Morrison’s the $9M oversight.

They have yet to get any Subject Matter Experts under contract to start the inventory or mapping. There’s no contracts. There’s an RFP that went out — the same RFP went out THREE TIMES because the Department of Public Safety has such a dysfunctional procurement capability. They now have half a dozen RFPs that went out. 

One is for Legal Services because the Task Force decided they don’t want to rely on or trust the Department of Public Safety’s lawyers. They want their own legal opinions to deal with things like supporting the formation of Municipal Regional governance Authorities, public records requests, interpretations of what information needs to be exempt or claimed exempt, etcetera. They were clear that they want their own lawyer. So they put out an RFP for their own lawyer. 

They put out an RFP for a Project Manager as was authorized in C.114. And they put out an RFP for Subject Matter Experts, (SMEs). So many RFPs were issued yet there’s still no contracts executed enabling the SMEs to begin work!

Which brings us to — there’s now a contract for a Project Manager signed just last Friday, but by some lame-brained analysis, they hired one of the direct competitors to all the folks that had proposed to become Subject Matter Experts! This was a last resort selection as one PM of three was disqualified and the other withdrew. That left only one choice, other than to rethink the approach. They declined to consider instead hiring a Program Manager and relying instead on the SMEs’ project managers despite the suggestion. 

The SMEs are now forced to either withdraw their own proposals or risk being required to disclose their trade secrets, strategies and methodologies with their direct competitor. Unprecedented dysfunction led to that bad decision which must now be remedied! 

I don’t think anybody’s yet targeting or proposing other uses for the $11M. It’s General Funds so it’s extremely fungible. But if this initiative blew up, which it seems on course to do, some hungry Legislators might start eyeing that $11M more aggressively.

So that’s the $11M dollar GF side. Then there’s the $9M dollar CDS side which was a Leahy earmark, aka Congressional Directed Spending.

The $9 million earmark came through the Community Oriented Policing (COPS) program from the Department of Justice. And that is just a bad fit. It doesn’t fit with regional dispatch initiatives because the state is required by the COPS program rules to retain ownership of any equipment purchased with that $9M. For example they can’t sub-grant it to Regional Dispatch initiatives. 

And even worse, the money has to be encumbered by the end of 2024 or it goes back – reverts back to the feds if not spent. Written COPS guidance or DPS staff analysis has never been presented by DPS for the Task Force to review or discuss. Highly suspicious.

Now how does that fit with the Task Force having been charged with “consulting with DPS Commissioner” on use of the $9M? The Task Force has been meeting for six months and still doesn’t have any experts on board or even starting to work on the plan of how to spend it. 

And not only do we need help to write the plan, we have to have ADS retain an Independent Expert to review any plans costing over a million dollars, both on the $9M CDS and the $11M GF projects. This should really be one integrated project!

And then you’ll need to run an RFP procurement for  bidding on equipment and services that might take another six months. 

And yet to be mentioned anywhere is the elephant in the room, the ongoing Operation and Maintenance costs which, over ten years, are equivalent to the capital costs, yet no funding sources have been identified!

So what did the Department of Public Safety do in response to that “nod” from the Task Force? They simply compiled a wish list of improvements to their own LMR and microwave systems: replace their own Land Mobile Radio Systems and replace their microwave dishes, add some new  microwave links here and there, some new generators, etc. All stuff that in no way directly connects or supports Regional Dispatch. It just strengthens the state’s system. And they don’t have any implementation plans completed for any of it. 

They put forth a wish list and said “we can spend $9M this year.” But a statutory hurdle is evident: an independent expert review is required by 3VSA §3303 for any project costing over a million dollars. And those IRs require detailed plans as a starting point. But the DPS doesn’t have any plans nor will they release the details of cost estimates supporting their wish list, claiming an exemption for “contract negotiations”! This specious claim is being made before an RFP is even released and long before a vendor is selected and contract negotiations would begin! This is typical obstruction by DPS lawyers to public records transparency and accountability!

And then there’s another RFP — the DPS with ADS put out an RFP for an Independent Expert review. But there’s clearly nothing for the Independent Reviewer to review. And so they received no bids. No bids at all. Surprise!

Then they put out another RFP for a Project Manager — just for the $9M CDS projects. They are still refusing to disclose the bidders names.  Release of bidders names routinely happens  at bid openings in BGS purchasing, but cagey DPS is claiming a contract negotiations exemption. 

So they’re contemplating having dueling Project Managers, one getting the cart way out in front of the horses. The $9M DPS wish list is the cart. The $11M planning process by the SMEs are the horses ad required by section C.114. One PM on the $11M side doing planning and another on the $9M unplanned side, just spending. What an untenable and reckless mess.

And they have now put out yet another RFP, NOT posted the the state bid opportunities website, for “Strategic Planning and Analysis.” That RFP came out last week, a week ago Monday and it’s issuance was denied in GovOps when Jen was asked directly “Are there any others RFPs open?.”

That RFP for “Strategic Planning and Analysis” is to invent or  compile the “strategic plans” ( these are not implementation plans as required by IR statute) for the $9M or, again unprecedented, conclude that it cannot possibly be done in time to not forfeit the $9M, in which case, recommend another plan! In three weeks!

But this “SPA RFP” has a $25K dollar cap on it and only three weeks in which to do the work! So you’re asking SMEs to put a plan together from scratch for $9M dollars worth of complex technology spending in three weeks? Impossible! Absolutely impossible. 

Is it possible that someone has already done a lot of work on it and it can just be built upon? No. In fact, the Department of Public Safety responded to a records request “we have no plans” and “no such records exist.” 

But also this RFP reveals: Oh “we’ve got experts on retainer.” But some of whom they name as “on retainer” are the very same people or firms who are going to try to bid on installing or providing the equipment. Such would be a direct conflict of interest: Motorola for radios, Avtech for dispatch consoles and R.L.Telecom, aka Robert Cornell from Middletown Springs, for installation. 

So they will clearly have to disqualify themselves from bidding on the work by virtue of their participating on a retainer basis in designing the facade of a plan.

So the real linchpin here is that they’re in this situation. They need a plan. They put out an RFP for the plan, but for some reason it needs to be done in three weeks (it’s a minimum of ten weeks project). Why only three weeks? Because that’s what they put in the RFP. Maybe because they’re trying to run it as a charade or pretend plan to just find some unethical professionals, or even other Scott administration Cabinet members to rubber-stamp what they want to do and justify it. No way Jose!

And they must be thinking they can get an Independent Expert review of each of those several $1M+ projects not yet planned. But they’re not going to —  no one  who is credible is going to bid to do an Independent Review to risk their reputation and pretend to do a plan for $25K in just three weeks.

And so the long & short of this is that the state may need to forfeit the $9M in a budget year when every dollar counts!. We’d have to give back $9M when we had that money nearly in hand as the last real pork from Senator Leahy!

What does that mean for the state’s Emergency Services Communications quality, resiliency and reliability of service?

It’s an embarrasing missed opportunity of the highest order. It also means finally realizing that failure to plan comes at a price. We’re now paying the price of not having been doing this planning properly over many years. Ironically, if you look at Appendix G of the last Ten Year Telecommunications Plan you’ll see the most glaring examples. 

As a result of some language that I had crafted which Senator Brock proposed be amended into law governing the Ten Year Telecommunications Plan, PSD now has to either incorporate into the Plan the public comments they receive at the public hearings or written, or offer a written explanation of why it wasn’t incorporated. Revealing indeed.

And so a lot of these public safety communications resiliency issues were raised in writing or at the Ten Year Telecom Plan public hearings a few years ago. And yet the PSD Telecom staff brushed them off. And here’s the clincher. The guy who was sweeping them under the rug over at Department of Public Service during the Telecom Plan process has now become the new Director of Radio Technology Services at the Department of Public Safety! And now he’s paying the price for his failure to really plan prior. Hilarious.

So right now there are vulnerabilities and coverage dead zones all over the place.

What this section C.114 planning process would do is create a regional planning framework, integrated with State communications systems for resilience. 

What’s that mean? Who’s paying for it? Who owns the radio infrastructure? What are the rates? How are dispatch mistakes handled?

Montpelier police killed a man holding a pellet pistol — shot him dead – put two rifle rounds in him, because they didn’t connect two records in their records management /dispatching system from just weeks apart. They knew from an officer conducted welfare check a few weeks prior that the guy was suicidal, off his meds, hallucinating and wanted to jump off a bridge. And yet the dispatcher didn’t connect those dots. “This is Mark Johnson” she said over the radio, “this is Mark Johnson.” She didn’t say hold your fire because oh oh, look at this other record, right!

And there’s still no CFMAS governance in place to examine that killing. They still refuse to acknowledge that as a dispatcher error. 

And the idea is if you had a regional system, it would include oversight of errors, right? And oversight of purchases and oversight of pay scales and oversight of staffing, overtime and upgrades and maintenance costs. Now all that’s run by Montpelier  PD as a monopoly enterprise and you either pay their asking price or you… — you can’t find anybody else.

Barre Town found somebody else. They contract with Lamoille County  Sheriff at a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. They just re-upped for three more years.

Even the governor’s lawyer, Jay Pershing Johnson says, “it’s working now.”  But yet  Sheriff Roger Marcoux — one of the dispatchers or deputies says “we don’t even have a generator on one of our main transmission towers.” Wow!

And who is overseeing all this? 

No one is. Not in any certain sense. Now it’s held together with bubblegum, duct tape and baling wire and with many unmapped radio dead zones. And still we refuse to acknowledge what condition it’s in and how unprepared we are for disasters.

And that’s one of the first things these SME experts, once they finally get hired, are supposed to do, is an inventory of the equipment, the age, the capacity, coverage, the failover capability and the dead zones AND TO ENGINEER SOLUTIONS TO REMEDY THOSE, INCLUDING CELL COVERAGE DEAD ZONES.

So we’re hopefully going to end up with a very transparent, detailed map of exactly what we have now and what’s working and what’s at risk of collapsing when a hurricane comes through. DPS may then try to keep it all secret. Be forewarned!

But here’s another policy issue that’s truly at the crux of the immediate matter. It’s that the law that enabled the spending of the $9M and the $11M put guardrails on the $11 million. You can have a million$ on passage. If you need the second million$ come ask the Joint Fiscal Committee. If you need to do pilot projects, you can use up to $4.5M. Come ask the Joint Fiscal Committee. But no guardrails on the $9M!

It said Jen, here’s the $9M. You “shall consult with the task force.” Jen thinks that was a one-off consult requirement. She got the Task Force to nod ‘go do your thing.’ ‘Do your… — buy your wish list.’ She now thinks that the Task Force has nothing more to say nor oversight about how that money is spent or planned or independently reviewed or anything. She thinks there’s a chinese firewall in place and there absolutely is not.

She (more likely “her team”) likes having a $9M slush fund, a pot of windfall dollars — of discretionary money for the wish list.

I think Commissioner Morrison is in over her head. She has no technical skills in these matters and she doesn’t have team members who really know this stuff or who have been diligent or transparent about planning in the past. She is now refusing to answer key questions such as “Are you representing that you conducted due diligence on the ethical lapses, errors and omissions of Televate prior to contracting with them as a Project Manager, senior over their competitors? or “How is it that the not to exceed $500K contract with Televate has no signatures by BGS/Purchasing or SecAdmin?” She said “I don’t have to answer that.”

The RFP the Task Force put out for Subject Matter Experts demonstrates this lack of capacity.  It was a horrible word salad disaster of disjointed concepts, obviously cobbled by someone with a lack of understanding of the tasks required and still  they had to issue it three times. 

So Commissioner Jen Morrison clearly doesn’t have the smarts within her DPS shop to do this. And some folks are still not willing to risk forfeiting the $9 million by tolerating DPS having no Plan B to backstop the “wish list” non-plan.

The Task Force, or better yet, a reconstituted, reinvigorated, engaged and capable Task Force, should have explicit ongoing oversight of the CDS $9M and the $11M GF. After all, this is only the beginning of what might be a ten year, $100M+ statewide investment, with another comparable amount over the life of the systems required for operations and maintenance.

How did we get into this mess?

But wait! There’s more!

An “Emergency Communications Advisory Council” was created by executive order four or more years ago, yet no one was ever appointed.

And then there is the “Governor’s Emergency Preparedness Advisory Council” but they have produced no plans or reports and even the agenda and minutes are secret. Don’t you feel safer already?

The Telecommunications and Connectivity Advisory Board, found in statute  30VSA 202f, is to meet at least quarterly, to advise the Commissioner and hold annual public hearings with the Commissioner on the Ten Year Telecommunications Plan. This body has completely disbanded, not having held a meeting in several years not the least of which is the required annual public hearing with the Commissioner, held NOT ONCE since being created probably eight or more years ago.

A Hoffer letter exchange with Public Service Department Commissioner June Tierney cautioning that the Ten Year Telecommunications Plan fails to set any performance measures and may not meet requirements of statute yet PSD hired the same contractor Matt Dunne/CTC three years later to revise the Plan expecting a different result! Good quotables in those letters on State Auditor Hoffer’s website.

The Department of Public Safety is required by the feds (DHS) to craft and regularly update a Statewide Communications Interoperability Plan (SCIP) but which has never been completed. The same federal funding program requires the state to have an appointed SWIC, a StateWide Interoperability Coordinator yet Vermont has had not appointed one since RTS director at DPS, Terry LaValley retired several years ago.

And then there is LifeLine fiasco, now renamed VCOMM — a pair of state owned tactical radio channels that can be activated in any area when needed by first responders, BUT…. doing so requires DTMF radio tones and most all radios today lack the 12 button phone like keys to generate DTMF. It had been reported that the DPS had wasted $12M-$13M on this poorly planned, unused project. But a recent records request produced a spreadsheet that reveals they have now spent $27M on this farce. And then another request revealed that they never even completed the statutory requirement for an Independent Review prior to purchase of LifeLine as is required by statute for any information technology activities costing more than $1M. That statute is 3VSA 3303.

And then there was the RFP for radio dispatch consoles involving, who else?, Motorola and L3/Harris, that was litigated as unfair, tied up in court for years.

And the recent RFP for Subject Matter Experts needed to begin work on the statewide dispatch system plan, which should have been issued last July, now has been issued THREE TIMES, yet still no SMEs have been hired, only the dishonest weasels at Televate as Project Managers, hired just a week ago, and who are direct competitors to the real expert SMEs who now wonder if they should even continue to try to help Vermont out of this mess due to chronic DPS dysfunction.

And need I mention as another example? On August 7, 2017 Governor Scott issued EO No.13-17. This Order established the Interagency Committee on Chemical Management.

Your tax dollars at work!

Integrated Planning appears to be feared or even reviled by the administration (witness the cruel homeless hotel expulsions) which mistakenly views planning not as precautionary cost savings, steering and holding accountable the “ship of state” but as an unnecessary expense, which really just time-shifts and compounds the costs and wasted dollars which will only be fully realized after Governor Scott will have left office.