San Jose, Calif., Won’t Join Regional Public Safety Broadband Project, Questions Motorola Grant
The San Jose, Calif., City Council voted Tuesday not to join the Bay Area Broadband Enhanced Wireless Project (BayWEB), funded with a $50 million BTOP grant to Motorola from NTIA. The city will send letters to NTIA asking the agency to reallocate the money to Bay area cities and counties, a San Jose official told us. The project will move forward, and if any city drops out of the project, it’s out, an NTIA spokeswoman said. Applying for the money is no longer an option, she said.
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City officials expressed frustration over what they called a lack of openness about the project. Details about whether and how BayWEB will promote regional public safety interoperability are unverified, they said. They noted that current public safety radio systems aren’t on broadband and said local governments don’t know what additional equipment they will need to buy at what cost. The BayWEB projects relate only to broadband communications and are separate from current public safety radio systems, city officials said.
The project is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and assumes that local governments will contribute, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed said. It also will require unknown annual payments from localities, he said. Lack of transparency concerning the project resulted in Freedom of Information Act and Public Records Act requests to federal and local agencies, Reed said. BayWEB began as a project of the Bay Area Urban Area Security Initiative, whose staff in February teamed up with the Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern and decided to create a public-private partnership with Motorola. The first phase of the project is funded with $6 million in Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) money from Homeland Security. Motorola won $50 million in stimulus money from NTIA. City officials said governments in the region have not been told of the financial obligations of taking part in the project or of alleged inappropriate actions by UASI staff which the city officials did not specify, and they weren’t informed that key documents have been signed on behalf of nonexistent entities without being voted on.
The Alameda County Sheriff has set a Wednesday deadline for Bay area counties and big cities to commit to BayWEB. It’s surprised to see that San Jose is the only city holding public hearings on the project, Michelle McGurk, the mayor’s senior policy advisor, told us. The mayor will send letters to NTIA and to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke emphasizing the city’s support for regional interoperability of public safety communications, she said. But the letter will also underscore the needs for openness about the project and for reallocating the money to Bay area cities and counties, she said. The project has been contentious for four months. San Jose and Santa Clara Country, where the city is located, have been the most outspoken about the procedures used to select Motorola as a private partner (CD Sep 14 p9). NTIA indicated the city commitments were intended to provide clarity and certainty about the scope of the project to allow it to move forward.
Motorola Solutions and Bay area public safety agencies made an agreement to build a 700 MHz LTE system and are to develop it to offer an overlay to Project 25 standards-based IP cores and networks, a Motorola spokesman said, without discussing city officials’ concerns about matters such as costs. The company and the Bay Area Regional Interoperable Communications System seek to work together to develop a mission-critical voice and broadband multimedia network serving multiple agencies throughout the region, he said. NTIA couldn’t be reached immediately to comment.