Mono County IT staff and public-safety partners told the Board of Supervisors they are making steady progress on the CHRIS (statewide P25) radio migration, with site upgrades, fiber redundancy work and vehicle radio installations advancing.

Kirk, the county’s CHRIS project lead, reported that electrical work at the Lincoln Mountain site is finished and that preparations for a microwave link between Lincoln Mountain and Mammoth Lakes Fire Station 1 are under way. County public works crews were completing conduit work at the Conway Summit site; Kirk said the conduit installation will enable multiple fiber connectivity points and provide redundancy to Digital 395 and the state microwave backbone.

Kirk said county dispatch has met with project staff to design two possible dispatch interfaces: a hybrid view that retains today’s screens plus CHRIS resources and a CHRIS-dedicated display for future operations. He also said a manual radio-ID assignment field the state required has been entered for each radio and that radios are now fully configured in county programming software.

The vendor Sierra Electronics is configuring new pagers required by CHRIS and preparing a demo paging end-to-end from dispatch to pager for testing. Mobile-radio installation in county vehicles continues; Kirk said Sierra had scheduled vehicle installs to start the week of Oct.13 but the vendor pushed the start to Oct.20. Most fire and law enforcement units already have new radios in place; county public-works vehicles remain the primary group awaiting installations.

Kirk told supervisors that the CHRIS endpoints are tied to serial numbers and state IDs, which will enable more rigorous asset tracking and prevent unauthorized radios from operating on the statewide system. He said that when the county flips to CHRIS the paging tones and core paging functions will remain the same but backend channels and endpoints will be transitioned.

Board members asked about transitioning dispatch operations to the new jail facility; Kirk said the system is architected so dispatch endpoints can operate in parallel at the old and new sites and that the county can perform a graceful cutover once redundancy and testing are complete.

Kirk also said the county is performing preventative maintenance on mountaintop sites and that progress updates and vehicle-install status reports will return to the board at future meetings.

No formal action was requested; staff encouraged departments to continue coordinating with the project team and the vendor to reduce delays and ensure a smooth operational transition.