Distress Signal

For more than a year, city department heads have complained behind the scenes about unreliable technology police officers and firefighters rely upon.

Those include radios linked by signals transmitted via equipment at the Regional Emergency Communications Center that enable them to communicate with each other, and Computer Aided Dispatch software that connects dispatchers with first responders.

Both have proven faulty.

Santa Fe Police Chief Paul Joye tells SFR his radio sometimes stops working, even right outside his office at police headquarters, “for no reason.”

“You’ll get the out-of-range tone, and then the radio will actually display that I’m out of range. But I haven’t moved,” Joye says. “I’m sitting in my car, in the parking lot of the station.”

Crashes to the CAD system mean officers lack a more complete picture of what they’re headed into when responding to emergencies. For example, the system tracks officer locations in real time and helps relay messages from officers to callers.

“These things are really closely related, and it’s important that both are functioning appropriately,” Joye says.

Both systems failed simultaneously last June while crews were fighting a large fire at a townhome near Jaguar Drive, City Fire Chief Brian Moya says.

“At that fire, we had no communications at all,” Moya tells SFR. “So, we were literally screaming at each other and using cell phones…That just can’t happen.”

City Information Technology and Telecommunications Director Manuel Gonzales tells SFR he has repeatedly warned county officials since the fall of 2021 about such a scenario.

“It was something I’ve been saying, ‘Guys, we’re going to get to a place where the radios aren’t working and CAD goes down,’” he says, calling fire last June “a perfect storm” that brought that warning to pass.

The fix has not taken place because of a complicated relationship between the City of Santa Fe and Santa Fe County. City officials say they want to tie into the state’s emergency radio network, but that will require a technology upgrade first at the RECC. The CAD system storage capacity also needs improvement.

Santa Fe County operates the RECC under a joint powers agreement with the City of Santa Fe and Town of Edgewood. RECC Director Roberto Lujan is a county employee and the county must provide for day-to-day operations including staff, while costs for capital projects such the system updates are divided among the three governments. A board composed of city, county and town staff, plus the county sheriff and an at-large member, provides oversight and guidance.

City Manager John Blair, who sits on the board, says it’s been difficult to get the county to act on important changes. Blair tells SFR when he took his current position in January 2022, Gonzales demanded the two discuss the communication weak point. Since that time, Blair says he’s been urging county leaders to address CAD outages and make the radio technology update.

The RECC board agreed last September to upgrade the CAD system because of frequent crashes. At the time, Lujan attributed the failures to a system overloaded with data. Four months later, in February, the city forked over $82,094 toward the storage project and $64,210 toward the radio project. Edgewood also contributed its part for both projects.

County leaders now expect both the CAD and radio project to be completed this summer.

Deputy County Manager Elias Bernardino tells SFR the county received the needed equipment a month after it received payment from the city for the CAD project and the update will be completed by July.

“That’s about a four month period, give or take. I think that’s a reasonable amount of time from when we received it to having a system this complex to be fully utilized,” he says.

The county has also recently contracted with Motorola to switch over to the state’s radio system, with the work targeted for August.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza, an independently elected official who relies on the county for budget approval, tells SFR his department has experienced the same problems the city reports. He says he is confident the county will get things straightened out. “Unfortunately, things don’t happen as fast or as smoothly as they should,” Mendoza says.

Blair says the county initially planned that the radio upgrade wouldn’t happen until mid-September, which he points out would have come after the biggest annual pressure on public safety each year: the Sept. 1 Burning of Zozobra at Fort Marcy.

“When we get an email saying, ‘Hey, it looks like we’re going to do the switchover on the system sometime between Sept. 5 to the 15th,’ that doesn’t work,” Blair says.

According to Blair, the RECC board agreed at its June 15 meeting to update the radio system before Zozobra.

As for last year’s Zozobra, Gonzales says his department borrowed about 120 radios from the state, and that firefighters and police officers have all been supplied with cell phones with a push-to-talk function as redundancy, should radio signals fail.

Officers can also use their “line of sight” radios to communicate with each other for backup, says Joye, but that’s not a permanent solution.

“We try to account for, and compensate for, the event that radios go down,” he says. “But I can say luck is not a strategy and we’ve been very lucky so far that we’ve been able to avoid serious issues.”