County eyes FEMA grant for 800 MHz upgrades

HILLSDALE COUNTY — Hillsdale County officials recently met with a representative from Sen. Gary Peters office to discuss the county’s needs for 800 MHz emergency telecommunication upgrades.

Peters chairs the U.S. Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and his representative encouraged Commissioner Brad Benzing and 911 Director Thomas Whitaker to apply for a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant to possibly finance all or part of the county’s needs.

Benzing informed the Hillsdale County Board of Commissioners of the discussions on March 26 as the commissioners prepared to simultaneously ask voters to approve a ballot proposal in August to fund the upgrades.

In a follow-up email to The Hillsdale Daily News, Benzing stated that the federal grant could be approved in full, partially or not approved at all so proceeding with the ballot initiative was prudent.

But the county will not hear back on the federal funding until later this summer or even into the fall timeframe, Benzing explained.

Whitaker explained March 28 that if the grant is approved in full or even partially, that amount would be used to offset taxpayer costs even if the ballot measure passes.

More: County’s public safety officials look for solutions for outdated communications system

More: Officials: State funding unlikely for upgrades to 911 radio system in Hillsdale County

The Aug. 6 ballot initiative will be the second time the county has asked the voters to decide on the issue. A $11 million ballot measure in 2022 failed and while that number is a good starting point, with today’s inflation and status of the economy, a new total amount isn’t expected to be calculated until mid-April.

The leaders of emergency response agencies, government heads, and 911 staff met jointly in late January with a representative from Motorola to begin discussing needs again.

Whitaker said that although new figures are not yet available, the 2022 measure would have cost the average taxpayer around $5 a month.

Hillsdale County currently sits on “an island” as being the only county in the tri-state region to continue operating on an outdated system that prohibits and complicates communicating with surrounding jurisdictions and within local services themselves depending on which area of the county they are in.

While some agencies have made the transition on their own, a bulk of area fire departments and police departments continue to operate on the old system.

Needed upgrades include replacing two failing communications towers in the county.

The county lobbied State Rep. Andrew Fink and Sen. Joseph Bellino’s offices for a state appropriation to make the upgrades happen after the 2022 ballot measure failed, but those efforts never came to fruition.

Hillsdale County Commissioner Brad Benzing, the county’s public safety chair, previously said that even if the 911 Board pulled the maximum 911 surcharge on all phones in the county at $3 per month, revenues would only increase by $170,000 a year meaning it would take approximately five years to replace one communications tower alone.

“We’re actually going to struggle to maintain the system we have now in the future,” Benzing — a firefighter and emergency medical technician by trade — said. “We simply do not have the revenue without either an earmark or appropriation from the state or at some future point the voters approving some form of dedicated funding.”

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The current Hillsdale County Board of Commissioners began looking into upgrading the outdated system countywide in early 2022 although discussions about the migration to the 800 MHz network have been ongoing since at least 2008.

The Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Office utilized state and federal funding to make the transition already and a number of fire departments and EMS agencies along the county’s eastern border with Lenawee County have already transitioned on their own.

The commissioners previously discussed using part of the $8.8 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding they received to fund the project, but a majority of that funding has now been earmarked and used for capital improvements of the county’s buildings, mainly at the county’s historic courthouse.

— Contact Reporter Corey Murray at cmurray@hillsdale.net or follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @cmurrayHDN.

This article originally appeared on Hillsdale Daily News: County eyes FEMA grant for 800 MHz upgrades