Catoosa County approves radios for sheriff’s office

Catoosa County has approved the purchase of more than two dozen new radios for the Sheriff’s Office.

During the Board of Commissioner’s meeting on Oct. 15, sheriff’s Maj. Kelly Holcomb explained the need for the new equipment and the issues that currently exist when it comes to repairing the current radios.

“We’re seeking approval to purchase 32 radios from the 2014 SPLOST funds that were allocated for radios,” Holcomb explained. “Our radios are nearing their end of life and they’re not able to be repaired at this time, so we’re seeking to purchase new ones.”

As has been the case with neighboring emergency agencies, finding the parts and professionals to repair aging radio equipment is becoming more difficult to do.

“There’s a company that works on them, but that’s if they have the parts they can fix them,” Holcomb said. “What we’re running into is that they don’t carry a lot of the parts. Motorola doesn’t supply the parts anymore, so they’re nearing the end of life.”

Holcomb said that plan is to keep the old radios for emergency use after new ones are purchased.

“What we’ll do is we’ll place the old radios into a cache that are used for emergency purposes,” Holcomb said. “We can’t use them for dayto-day — only in an emergency or we would have to pay for additional licensing, so as radios break, we pull from that cache to replace some of those radios.”

The board ultimately approved the purchase by unanimous vote in the amount of $156,761.60.

Although 32 radios is a significant amount, Holcomb said, the purchase won’t even replace half of the radios currently in service.

“This is only going to replace about 40-percent of our radios,” Holcomb said.