Deputy Commissioner Dan Basy lays out plan to spend roughly $8.5 million on public-safety communications upgrades

Deputy Commissioner Dan Basy, co-chair of the Public Safety Communications Task Force, told the Government Operations & Military Affairs Committee on March 12 that the task force has a set of prioritized recommendations for how to spend recently appropriated funds to improve statewide public-safety communications.

Basy, who said he was speaking both as the Department of Public Safety deputy commissioner and as a task-force co-chair, outlined four principal spending categories: a governance model, a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, cybersecurity and expanded RapidSOS/GIS functionality, and targeted land-mobile-radio (LMR) infrastructure projects. He told the committee that he would follow up with written figures to confirm the numbers he gave orally.

The task force's estimate for an independent governance board was about $1.77 million, which Basy said covered an executive director, staffing and the development of standards and certifications. He also said the department opposes creating an independent board; if the committee omits that governance setup, the roughly $1.77 million could be reallocated to other…