Daniels County meeting probes tower ownership, radio failures and federal SS4A grant opportunity

Officials and vendor representatives at a Daniels County meeting described multiple technical and ownership issues affecting the county’s radio infrastructure and discussed pursuing federal grant funds to support communications buildout.

Red Tail and county staff described confusion about which assets are privately or federally owned at the Tower Hill and Flaxville sites and said they will document equipment and provide photos and written descriptions to clarify ownership with Border Patrol and to support future permission requests. A vendor reported that Roger Smith, formerly on the Interoperability Montana project, confirmed the Radio Hill tower, generator and propane tank belong to the county while the building and the guyed tower belong to Border Patrol; the vendor said the Flaxville site belongs to the county.

The meeting also focused on persistent subscriber-radio problems. Vendor staff said several XTL 5000 mobile and base radios will not affiliate with the trunked system; their troubleshooting plan calls for importing a working code plug from a neighboring county to test whether the problem is configuration-related or a hardware fault. Vendor staff warned that the radios are old and may be at the end of their useful life, but that testing a working configuration could allow rebuilding radios with Daniels County settings before recommending replacements.

County and vendor participants flagged an operational interference problem: Flaxville and Peerless use the same frequencies and, because of terrain, transmissions are keying both repeaters and creating static. The vendor said correcting the issue requires enabling PL-tone segregation at each repeater and updating every subscriber radio that carries both sites — work that will require coordinated visits to multiple agencies and on-site reprogramming.

Separately, meeting participants discussed the U.S. Department of Transportation Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) discretionary grant. Attendees were told preliminary applications for some SS4A funds were due April 24, with final applications due May 26; SS4A includes funding streams both to write comprehensive safety action plans and for actual project buildout. The program prioritizes rural areas and places with higher poverty rates and typically requires a safety action plan to be eligible for project funds; counties without a plan can apply for plan-writing funds to become competitive for future buildout awards. Participants discussed forming a collective of counties to prepare competitive applications and noted the short timetable would require immediate coordination.

County staff asked vendor and regional contacts to continue conversations, share any granular crash or post-collision data available from state sources, and coordinate a timeline for subscriber reprogramming and site work. The meeting closed with instructions for vendors to supply documentation, for staff to follow up on legal/permission questions, and with plans to proceed with the installations and troubleshooting already funded in the dispatch equipment motion.