The Sedona City Council took 17 minutes on April 8 to vote unanimously for a $1,107,587.30 linking agreement with Zetron Inc. for the replacement of the Sedona Police Department’s radio network with a new system that will provide greater coverage.
“Sedona City Code Section 3.05.020.C. permits the city to procure goods and services without the formal bidding process by participating with other governmental units in cooperative purchasing agreements when the best interests of the city would be served,” the agreement stated.
Under the terms of the linking agreement, which will coordinate SPD’s radio replacement with a similar project being undertaken by the Sedona Fire District, Zetron will replace SPD’s analog system with its MT-4E digital system, which is a voted simulcast two-channel system operating on VHF frequency bands. The system will utilize the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials Project 25 standards that allow message traffic to be encrypted.
The proposed scope of work specifies that Zetron will replace SPD’s current set of four receivers and two transmitters with seven transceivers and four receivers, along with repeaters, power amplifiers and cabling. Transceivers will be located at the north end of Airport Mesa; SFD Station 2 on Upper Red Rock Loop Road, Station 3 in the Village of Oak Creek and Station 4 in Uptown; Sedona Red Rock High School; the wastewater treatment plant; and Bear Mountain; while receivers will be placed at the south end of Airport Mesa, Sedona Police Department headquarters and SFD Station 1 in West Sedona and Station 6 in the Chapel area. Channel one will transmit on 158.7600 MHz and receive on 156.0450 MHz, and channel two will transmit on 158.8950 MHz and receive on 155.9250 MHz.
“Your mountains are beautiful, but they’re hard for us to navigate radio communications through,” sales manager Rick Felt commented with regard to equipment placement.
“How much improvement are we going to get?” Vice Mayor Holli Ploog asked. “We have a terrain that we can’t change.”
“It’s a huge improvement to what you have today,” Felt said.
“They already have quite a few of these places already in play, so this will just be adding more bricks into the system,” Don Brown of Zetron said of SFD’s existing network. He explained that the system will vote among available transceivers to maximize signal reception. “This is a closed system with several firewalls and routers.”
“So no Russian hackers are going to be doing a demand for payment to open this back up?” Councilman Brian Fultz asked.
“It is completely air-gapped to the outside world,” Brown said.
SPD Support Services Manager Erin Loeffler said that adopting the linking agreement would allow the department to “avoid all the remaining phases left in this project.”
“If approved, planning and execution of this project would begin around July 1, 2025, with a cut-over and project completion date sometime in July of 2026,” Loeffler said.
Councilwoman Kathy Kinsella confirmed that city staff will not actually place the order for the equipment until after July 1, as the funding allocation will be included in the fiscal year 2026 budget.
Council voted unanimously to approve acquisition of the system.
