MACC to lease tower

MOSES LAKE — The Multi Agency Communication Center’s board of directors decided to pursue a lease for a new Moses Lake radio tower.

The center is in the middle of upgrading and building towers across the county as part of an initiative to improve communication for emergency services in Grant County. This followed a voter approved 0.1 percent sales tax increase in 2005.

Crews finished upgrading five towers, including Quincy, Grand Coulee, Wahitis, Ephrata and Beverly. They are in the process of adding towers in Sun Lakes, Coulee City, Hartline, Wilson Creek and Pixlee.

“The plan was to fix the infrastructure first,” Radio Communications Manager Dean Hane said in a previous interview. “What that means is that we’re rebuilding sites. We’re taking old rotted buildings out of service and replacing them with new concrete, bullet resistant buildings with motion sensors, exterior lighting, fences. The sites have been engineered. The towers have been engineered. We’re going to be at these sites for longer than all of us.”

The board intended to purchase a three-acre piece of land near Interstate 90, where both a new tower and dispatch center would be set up, Hane said. The antennas in Moses Lake are presently attached to a water tower on the south side of the city.

“Water tanks aren’t designed to be antenna structures. They can be made into one, but we prefer not to do that,” Hane said. “Moving further down our technology road, there may be more antenna that we require up here, so what’s going to happen is we’re going to have this antenna farm that we’re going to have up here within a very small area of each other and it’s going to be a huge technical problem.”

With all of the antennas on the same level, Hane said the signals will interfere with each other. This led to the decision to build a new tower.

The purpose of having the tower next to the building was to provide a direct link between the electronics controlling it and to have additional space for new radio equipment, he said. Part of the upgrade is replacing the radio equipment to meet a Federal Communications Commission requirement to halve the amount of bandwidth used by emergency services by 2013.

MACC is planning on running new and old systems while the police, fire and ambulance services purchase new radios, Hane said.

“We still need all of that old equipment in here working. Well, heck, where are we going to put the new equipment. It ain’t going to go in here, we’ve got to find another spot for it, another building,” he said.

For about two years, MACC hunted for a piece of property it could set both the new tower and a new building on, dismissing a piece of property next to their present location in the Moses Lake National Guard Armory because Hane said it isn’t the best location for a tower. 

He said at Thursday’s meeting they can’t find a spot of land for an acceptable price. Three acre plots are ranging from roughly $465,780 to $798,480 in the area they want it.

“The issue for us is finding a site that meets the coverage needs. That’s the driving factor,” Hane said. “Secondly affordable land, we’ve got to deal with power, utilities, access, all kind of things like that,” he said. “The advantage is to keep our timeline moving. That’s my trigger point. “

If MACC continued hunting for land for the site and the building, it could drag the process out a couple more years, he said. Instead of purchasing the land, Hane suggested leasing property for the tower.

MACC is examining several locations to rent property, including one owned by Grant County Fire District 5 on the corner of Potato Hill Road and Baseline Road, he said. While the lease is still being negotiated, Hane expects it to be roughly $1,000 a month.

“From a coverage standpoint, it covers Moses Lake very well. The location is good to see the other sites. We’re kind of grinding through some planning issues right now,” Hane said.

Grant County Sheriff Frank DeTrolio, who has opposed the land purchase and the new building, said he did have some concerns about the fire district 5 location. He said studies done by ADCOMM engineering stated the location was poor for a radio tower.

“I’m not in favor of it because it did not meet the requirements,” DeTrolio, who was not at Thursday’s meeting, said in an interview. “There are other options that meet the propagation requirements.”

Hane said the change does not alter MACC’s plan to build a new dispatch center. Instead of locating in next to the tower, it would be linked into the system with a smaller antenna. This is similar to the way the dispatch center is set up now.

“The trade off for me is that it keeps the overall radio project moving, instead of being held up by this three acre business. I’m at the stage right now that some of these other sites are coming together, we still have to get this thing done. It’s still the priority, so it makes reasonable sense to me to adjust the strategy,” he said.

While the benefit for keeping the dispatch center next to the tower would be lost, Hane said the plans remain for a new building by 2014.

“We can still do it. It happens a different way. I’d rather do it this way, but for the cost and the time. We’ve burned up almost two years and we could easily burn up more time and what’s going to happen is that all of the radio stuff is going to suffer,” he said.