Since the Chronicle first reported in December on the long and sluggish quest to secure a new public safety radio system for the city, the seven-year-old project is finally crackling with some new life.
The biggest change has been in project management — former Austin Police Dept. officer Pete Collins is now at the project’s helm, replacing Kenny Williams of APD and Danny Hobby of the city of Austin’s Information Systems Dept. Williams and Hobby had been managing the project since they came up with the idea for it in 1985. Williams was reassigned in December, and Hobby is retiring from city employ after 20 years.
Unfortunately, the changes haven’t done much to speed up the process. The timeline for the project’s implementation has been pushed back once again, and now it looks as if the system won’t be up and running before December 2001. While the technical evaluation of the two vendor proposals is complete and the financial evaluation has started — Collins expects that this portion will be completed within the next two weeks — a recommendation to the city still isn’t expected until the end of the summer. The last timeline called for a recommendation to be made by April.
In part, the delay is a result of the buyout of the radio division of potential vendor Ericsson Inc. by Comnet, a Pittsburgh-based cell phone company. The financial evaluations can’t be completed until Ericsson’s new partnership is finalized. The other vendor competing for the nearly $70 million project, which seeks to create a trunked radio system not only for Austin but for all of Travis County, is Motorola CE.
Despite the delay, optimism has remained high at the radio project’s new offices at the former Robert Mueller Airport. Assistant Police Chief Bruce Mills — who was appointed by Chief Stan Knee in December to oversee all of APD’s capital projects (replacing Williams, who was previously the department’s sole link to the radio project) — was all smiles when asked about his faith in the project with Collins at the helm. “He’s great, just great,” Mills said of Collins.
Unlike the former project managers, Collins is candid when relating both the positive and negative aspects of the project, which some say is a refreshing change from Williams and Hobby’s insistence that everything was always okay. “You have to report the good with the bad,” Collins said. “If something goes wrong it’s not because you’re incompetent, and you have to get past the human reaction of getting defensive.”
Indeed, Collins’ honesty about the project’s continued delays has helped quiet the concerns of local public safety officers, some of whom felt their needs were being undermined under previous management. “We’re still behind the curve,” said one officer. “But people are aware of it at this point, and they are reassessing their timelines. The people gathered up now are really committed to getting this thing going. It has redirected everything.”
This article appears in March 3 • 2000.