Upgrades and replacements to the City of Kenai police departments Motorola radios and in-car video systems were approved by the Kenai City Council through the acceptance of Resolution 2022-079 and 2022-080 at the December 21st Kenai City Council meeting.
Three grants, applied for by the City of Kenai under the 2022 Homeland Security Program, were funded totaling $229,500. The City received notice of award of a $112,000 grant to continue its police and fire public safety radio replacements.
Kenai Police Chief David Ross commented on radio replacements.
“This is for three projects. The first is probably the one I’m most excited about, the radios. This finishes the replacement of all the police, the fire radios; we’ve replaced all the police portable, fire portable, fire mobile, police mobile and all the dispatch radios. That’s been seven grants over the last five or six years and almost a million dollars in grant money just to replace public safely radios.”
The second grant awarded was for $35,000 for a Cyber Security Assessment.
Ross on Cyber Security…
“The Cyber Security Assessment, that’s something the IT departments is going to do. They did one before and are continually trying to improve our IT security and infrastructure. We’ve switched multi-facture authentication already as one upgrade based on the last cyber security assessment.”
The third grant for $82,500 completes updates to all police in-car video systems, awarded from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security passed through the State of Alaska Department of Military and Veteran’s Affairs.
Ross on in-car systems to be installed.
“We evaluated several camera systems last year in 2021 and started replacing them with the Watchguard System in the three new vehicles we got. This money will be enough to replace them in all the rest of the vehicles, so all of the vehicles will be operating with the same camera system.”
The council stated the importance to continue the replacement with the system that has already been selected for a number of reasons including efficiency, consistency among officers, maintenance of equipment, maintenance of software and server, and City shop installation. These funds will purchase 14 additional in-car video systems and complete the replacement in all the patrol vehicles.
David Ross, Kenai Police Chief, addressed the purchase of the Motorola radios. According to Ross, the quotes we (Kenai) have total $109,351.97, so no additional city funds will be required for this purchase. There are a number of reasons to use a sole source with Motorola for this purchase. KPD and KFD are both fully equipped with Motorola radios, and their personnel have experience working on and programming the Motorola radios. The departments also have accessories in place for managing these radios. This will replace the remaining radios with the same ones that we have been buying, making both maintenance and operations consistent across all the vehicles. The mobile radios that are currently in use by both departments have proven extremely reliable, with availability of maintenance from the vendor when required.
As a result of these grants two equipment replacement projects will not require City funding and have been removed from the five-year capital plan.