By DAVID BATES
Of the News-Register
Waldo Farnham couldn't take it anymore.
In the final week of August, the long-time McMinnville businessman and civic leader, who has a reputation for fiscal conservatism and a particular interest in law enforcement, did something few people would dare.
He marched down to the basement of the Yamhill County Courthouse and entered Room 32 with a piece of paper in his hand. He told the Yamhill County commissioners, who were meeting there at the time, that he had questions he wanted answered about their problem-plagued emergency communications system for local police and fire agencies.
Following the flag salute, each meeting includes a 30-minute period set aside on the printed agenda for citizens to talk about virtually anything that's on their minds. Hardly anyone ever uses it, but Farnham did this day.
He unloaded a blistering critique of the supposedly 18-month project, now about to enter its fifth year with full implementation projected for this fall
He termed it a "fiasco."
Farnham asked a dozen pointed questions, including a politically loaded one made famous by the Watergate scandal: What did you know, and when did you know it?
Officials took exception to some of Farnham's remarks. But in mid-September, County Administrator John Krawczyk responded to his questions.
Addressing Farnham's inquiry about when it "became clear that the project was failing," he said officials pegged that as the fall of 2005.
"After several missed deadlines, we became very concerned about management of the project," Krawczyk said. That was followed by "numerous lengthy meetings with Art Walker to assess the precise status."
A review of documents related to the project - including e-mails, memos, meeting minutes and other items - suggests, however, that the project had been afflicted by delays since at least early 2003. And it suggests the system was clearly in trouble by mid-2004.
Early signs of trouble
Yamhill County started ordering equipment for the new system early in 2003, a few months after voter approval of $1.4 million in financing in the general election of November 2002.
Almost immediately, the length of time it was taking to complete component tasks suggested that there was no way the system was going to be up and running by Nov. 1, 2003 as originally projected.
For example:
• On Jan. 29, 2003, the county issued a $840 purchase order to APCO International, a public safety communications company, for modifying some radio licenses for four low-power UHF frequencies that would be used by local firefighters. A hand-written note on the document indicates the licenses were not received until Oct. 2, less than a month before the supposed completion deadline.
• About a week after the first expected finish date had passed, the county, at Walker's request, ordered a $9,400 piece of equipment for the Doane Creek tower site. The invoice indicates it wasn't shipped until Jan. 19, 2004 - more than two months later.
• Before upgrades of the Doane Creek and Mountain Top tower sites could occur, and the foundation work for related buildings could be bid out, Walker indicated in an e-mail that it would be necessary to examine soil suitability. The county hired the Geostandards Corporation to do that job, at a cost of $3,300, in March 2004.
• There was already a 70-foot tower at what officials now call the Mountain Top West site. It's on property owned by Paul Wells, with whom YCOM had a 99-year lease. It's perched at an elevation of about 1,354 feet a few miles northwest of Newberg.
The microwave dish needed for Mountain Top, however, proved too big for the existing tower. The new structure didn't necessarily have to be taller, officials say, but in order to withstand the wind caught by a dish six feet or more in diameter, it would have to be stronger.
The county didn't issue a purchase order until mid-April 2004, for a 70-foot tower, valued at nearly $17,000, from Valmont. It would not be shipped, the invoice shows, until late July.
In the end, that turned out not to matter. The county wouldn't be able to use it for years to come.
Officials didn't know it yet, but their plans for the Mountain Top site - through no fault of their own - would ultimately fly off the rails. It would land them before the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals.
Mac goes live
The city of McMinnville, believing it had sufficient resources in hand or in the offing, decided to forge ahead on its own prior to the 2002 election authorizing the financing the county needed.
It fact, the county maintains it was the city's decision to proceed with development of a cutting edge MPT 1327 trunked radio system - in use in Europe, but then untested in the United States - that forced its hand on a choice that has plagued it every step of the way since.
In late August 2003, the city flipped the switch on its portion of what was intended eventually to be a single master system serving all police and fire agencies in the county except those serving Newberg and Dundee. Those two cities opted to install a widely used 800 MHz high-band system for their use some years earlier.
Then-Police Chief Wayne McFarlin likened McMinnville's move from a 50-year-old conventional low-band system to a high-tech trunked mid-band system to going from a manual typewriter to a high-speed computer. But there were problems - lots of problems.
Accounts of how bad those problems were and how well they've been addressed vary.
"It didn't work as promised," said a department source, who asked that he not be identified. "We'd have officers on foot chases, and they couldn't get on the air."
A memo handed to Ron Noble when he was hired to replace McFarlin three years later said the trunked system represented a significant improvement, eliminating "dead spots" and enabling officers to communicate inside buildings that had presented problems. McMinnville High School is one good example.
Compared with the old, low-band system, Noble says today, the trunked system was "leaps and bounds better." Others in the department echo those sentiments.
In the initial months, however, city police and fire personnel would only use it sporadically. They kept having to turn the trunking feature off so technicians could work on it.
Finally, in April 2004, the police department had had enough. It switched to conventional mode, temporarily abandoning the much-touted trunking feature, while technicians continued to work on the problems.
Mounting concerns
In the spring of 2004, Art Walker, whose consulting firm had been brought in to design the system and oversee its installation, turned an expense sheet in to Yamhill County.
One month before his contract was set to expire in June, he charged the county more than $4,100. More than half of that, $2,714, was for work "outside scope of contract."
His contract ended up being extended - although the details of that aren't clear. Gray said he vaguely recalls Walker's contract being extended once, perhaps twice, but a computer-aided search of minutes for every meeting of Yamhill County Commissioners doesn't show it.
"We don't think so," Lewis said. "We can't find any record that we did."
So for the next year and a half, claims for expenses "outside the scope" would become a monthly ritual. More often than not, they ran thousands of dollars a month.
Krawczyk realized by the summer of 2004 that progress on the radio system was going "slower than anticipated." At least those were the words he used in briefing the county commissioners when they adopted the communication district budget for 2004-05 on June 24.
Even so, updates from Walker had officials thinking that the system was nearing completion.
A couple of weeks earlier, Walker had told the county, according to the minutes from a June 9 meeting, that construction at Doane Creek and Mountain Top would be done by the end of July.
But that didn't happen.
By then, the county was working in earnest on one of the "optional" parts of Walker's contract: a tower at Eagle Crest, a 1,348-foot-elevation hill four miles south of Willamina. Like Doane Creek, it lay in Polk County, so would be subject to that county's land-use process.
As August approached, Walker provided this update:
High Heaven was finished. Mountain Top would be finished by Sept. 1. Doane Creek, still tied up in Polk County's land-use process, now had a projected completion date of Nov. 1.
The public hearing process for Eagle Crest, meanwhile, still had not started. It promised to be more daunting, so Walker didn't offer a target date for completion.
And so it went.
During the first week of August in 2004, Walker e-mailed Krawczyk to update him on "what should be the final budget estimate for completing the radio project." "It is ugly," Walker confessed.
When he crunched the numbers himself a few days later, Krawczyk determined Walker had left about $100,000 off the revenue side of the ledger. Even so, he was concerned.
By summer's end, Walker appeared to be feeling more optimistic. He also appeared to be keeping busy.
In August, an invoice shows, he put in a lot of time on the site design for Eagle Crest. He also worked with an FCC engineer to locate the source of some interference, did some work with channel licensing and compiled data for one of the county's multiple Homeland Security grant applications.
His bill for the month came to $4,853. He termed every bit of it outside the scope of the contract.
According to the minutes of an Aug. 25 meeting with county officials, his assessment was that things were "moving nicely."
Trouble on the mountain
One weekend in mid-October of 2004, Walker's assistant, Jim DeRosier, got a call from Paul Wells, who lived up on Mountain Top Road, a stretch of winding gravel that affords a stunning view of the north face of Dundee's Red Hills.
Back in 1990, Wells had agreed to a 99-year lease with YCOM for a piece of property at the end of his long driveway, about 100 yards from his house. On that patch of land, measuring 60 by 60 feet, YCOM had built a radio tower and operated it ever since.
Now, the county wanted to build another, stronger tower next to it. And Wells, DeRosier told Walker, "had some concerns."
"It looks like this is going to take a while," Walker would tell Krawczyk the next day, "which seems to be the norm now that we are down to the last sites."
"Take a while" turned out to be an understatement. The concerns Wells expressed to De- Rosier in October of 2004 were about to blossom into a debacle that would take more than a year to play out.
Anticipating new equipment at Mountain Top, Walker's consulting firm, Monart Associates, had given Wells a largely blank application for a site design review and asked him to fill it in, McMinnville City Attorney Candace Haines would explain later in a detailed e-mail to city officials. But he declined.
Wells asked that all future contact be through her, as she was serving at the time as YCOM's legal counsel as well as the city's. Meanwhile, he returned the form back and asked YCOM to fill it out so his attorney could review it.
Haines met with Krawczyk, McMinnville Fire Chief Jay Lilly and County Counsel John Gray. They decided to comply with Wells' request.
Gray's assistant, Rick Sanai, who handles the county's land-use work, completed the application "based exclusively on information provided to him by Monart," said Haines, who then sent the material to Wells.
His response, in February 2005, was to file a complaint with the Oregon State Bar. He named Haines, Gray and Sanai.
The application, he alleged, was riddled with errors. He alleged "disingenuous" officials were "pressuring" him.
Wells' complaint threw everyone for a loop. But Haines termed it "less troubling than most," when it came to bar complaints.
Ultimately, Haines, Gray and Sanai were all vindicated. The bar threw out the complaint.
But that set Wells to consider other venues in which to air his grievances. Meanwhile, county officials were again expressing concerns about project finances.
Meeting with county commissioners in March 2005, Krawczyk said, "We're seeing some financial troubles."
Relaying Walker's latest update, Krawczyk reported that the radio project was $26,000 over budget. That, he said, was largely due to the fact that about 50 more radios were needed.
The levy is not enough
County officials say today that voters knew - or that they should have understood from the get-go - that the MPT 1327 system might cost more than the amount of the levy.
In a Sept. 5 interview on KLYC 1260 AM, County Commissioner Leslie Lewis reiterated that, pointing out, "We said in the voters pamphlet that we'd seek other funding sources."
The county may very well have intended to do that, but, in fact, that was not part of the proposal voters saw.
The voters' pamphlet for the November 2002 election features no arguments for or against the radio levy. It includes only the measure's text and explanatory statement, neither making any reference to other revenue. Nevertheless, officials have been aggressively pursuing post-9/11 federal money for public safety.
After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security started offering money to local public safety agencies so they could beef up their own services and infrastructure. The county started applying for grants in 2003.
To date, the county has received more than $1.5 million from the federal government for the radio system. It's helped pay for towers, mobile display terminals, digital microwave links, engineering and software installation, and, of course, additional radios.
Yet another grant is expected this year, officials say, and that money is crucial. Without the grants, Krawczyk told the radio implementation committee in July 2005, there would not have been sufficient funds for all the components that were, by that point, included in the system.
"A tense meeting"
As the delays and expenses began to mount in 2005, the project continued to evolve.
By this time, McMinnville had resumed using the trunking feature of its system, but was still experiencing nettlesome problems with it. As work progressed on the county's portion, some of the parties to the process began to wonder if the trunking aspect was really necessary.
Earlier that summer, an e-mail alluded to a conversation between the West Valley Fire District's assistant chief, Dave Meier, and McMinnville City Councilor Paul May, a former Sheriff's Office lieutenant working with the radio group.
Meier had his ear to the ground. He knew where the rural fire districts stood. And he laid it out on July 14.
"I wanted to let you know that a majority of the agencies don't want to go to the MPT system," he wrote. "I feel someone needs to speak up now. I believe these agencies would like to just go conventional and ditch the MPT system."
Momentum against the MPT 1327 trunking component quickly began to build.
When the radio implementation committee next met on July 28, Sheridan Fire Chief Larry Eckhardt made a motion to set a Sept. 1 date for switching the fire districts from low-band to the 450 MHz mid-band, but on a conventional basis. This would be the same approach McMinnville used between April and December 2004, using the same 450 band as the MPT 1327, but without the trunking technology.
"The fire guys said, 'We've got to get off the low-band onto the conventional system,'" Lewis said. "It was a tense meeting."
Officials asked the agencies to give them a week to sort out the technical issues. When the group next convened in August, Krawczyk distributed a document titled, "Yamhill County UHF Conventional Radio System Needs Analysis."
They had decided to go conventional, using an existing tower on Eola Hills - one owned, coincidentally, by Farnham. Since all the microwave dishes weren't yet in place, however, they'd have to enlist Sprint to patch a fix together using telephone lines.
Most of the costs would be covered by grants, Krawczyk said. The county would absorb the rest.
The group signed off on it on a unanimous vote. Walker told them it was possible to have the system operational on a conventional basis by Sept. 1, 2005.
The rural fire agencies started using the conventional system in late September, leaving the sheriff's office stuck with its low-band system. Carlton police, given their proximity to the High Heaven tower, are able to use the trunked system.
Today, when McMinnville police officers encounter a hiccup now and then with their trunked radios, they marvel at how the sheriff's office fares.
Walker said the sheriff's office portion of the system would be ready by the end of October.
Then he revised that, saying it wouldn't be ready until after Thanksgiving.
"The last straw"
In early November 2005, the county was still working out bugs with the 450 MHz conventional system.
Krawczyk asked the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde if the county could use a tower on Spirit Mountain and the Oregon State Police if it could use one on Saddlebag Mountain.
Meanwhile, problems were cropping up on Chehalem Mountain. Upset about modifications to the Mountain Top tower, Wells complained to the county that YCOM needed to get land-use approvals or remove the tower from his property altogether.
On Nov. 3, 2005, the Yamhill County Planning Department ruled no such approval was required because the tower's height was not being increased. Wells continued to press the issue, but Gray told him the matter was closed.
By this point, Lewis had had enough with Art Walker.
Facing a bill for more than $53,000, Lewis sent him a check for $38,706. She indicated she'd asked the accounting department to withhold $14,813 "from the amount you have billed until we have an opportunity to meet."
Citing "significant cost increases" and "a loss of confidence in the system," Lewis made a proposal: "I would like to come up with a process for approval of work outside the scope of the contract."
Walker had previously received his first two payments of $41,794, officials say. But since the project wasn't completed during his tenure, some of the third payment was withheld.
But as the project had grown over the years, Walker had billed extensively for work outside contract. Along with the final check that November, the total amount paid to Monart Associates, according to the commissioners' office, was $192,309.
Meanwhile, the county had decided to solve the problem on Chehalem Mountain by erecting a new 70-foot tower at an "antenna farm" owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation, about a mile east of Well's property.
That tower would still need to communicate with the one to the west, however, and Wells proceeded to file a complaint about that with LUBA.
By December, snow on Chehalem Mountain had brought work on the Mountain Top site to a halt. Elsewhere, another problem had arisen - one that would require a forester.
Microwave radio relies on line-of-sight technology, so nothing can be allowed to block the dishes. But persistent problems led officials to realize something was blocking two of them in the western part of the county.
Lewis recalls her conversation with Walker this way:
"He said, 'I'm going to go out and see if there are trees between Doane Creek and High Heaven,'" she said. "He came back and said, 'Golly, there are a lot of trees between Doane Creek and High Heaven.'
"That was the last straw."
"Cease any and all work"
In January 2006, Yamhill County cut ties with Art Walker and Monart Associates.
Commissioners brought project management responsibilities in house, handing them to their information services chief, Murray Paolo. That was a decision winning virtually universal approval among the police and fire departments relying on the county's emergency communications system.
On Jan. 19, Paolo hand-delivered a letter to Walker. It stated: "You are hereby directed to cease any and all work on the project until further instructed by myself."
Officials said they've been billed for more than $15,000 by Walker since then, and have refused to pay for anything beyond a small amount of work on mobile data terminals. According to Krawczyk, that work was covered under a separate agreement.
Walker hasn't given any indication that he's planning to sue. So far, the county has not received any tort claim notice, and that's a prerequisite for any lawsuit. But the payment issues remain unresolved.
Paolo subsequently said that as far as he could tell, a needs analysis had never been done for emergency services in Yamhill County and it was high time one was conducted. The county hired National Interop, which spent February and March examining the county's radio infrastructure.
As of late March, they noted, the system had "significantly evolved" from Walker's original design. For the purposes of the study, then, National Interop looked at what the county actually had, not what Walker had proposed.
They offered a damning assessment. As of late March 2006, the firm said:
• The microwave links were not complete. "Significant issues" remained.
• The MPT 1327 system was working from only two sites - the one at High Heaven and the one next to the fire station in downtown McMinnville.
• Interoperability - the ability to communicate with agencies beyond Yamhill County - had not been achieved. Yet that had been one of the key goals from the outset.
• There didn't appear to be any system in place for developing protocols that would be needed for either trunked or conventional operation. Nor had anyone been trained in use of such protocols.
It also offered a mixed review of trunking technology in general.
MPT was widely used in Europe for business, industry and public utilities, and made highly efficient use of the radio spectrum where just a few channels can support up to 20,000 radio users. Given that no more than 300 people were likely to ever be on the air at one time locally, however, Interop found it "surprising that a trunking system of any type ... was chosen for Yamhill County."
AdComm enters picture
It took a year to figure out what to do next.
By mid-April of 2006, Paolo told commissioners that he had his arms around the radio project.
Later that month, the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals threw out Wells' complaint. However, by that point, officials had moved on, opting for space at the ODOT property a mile to the east.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security money continued to flow in. Another $321,000 came in August, most of it committed to continuing work at High Heaven.
National Interop may have diagnosed the disease, but a cure remained elusive. For that, the county used $50,000 in federal funds to hire the Washington-based firm AdComm Engineering. Their senior consultant, Joel Harrington, had worked on the radio system serving the Portland Police Bureau.
Around the end of 2006, AdComm weighed in with its analysis. While National Interop had suggested a $649,000 fix, and officials had argued that was high, AdComm recommended a $3 million, three-phase fix that would take a couple of years to implement.
In February 2007, commissioners bit the bullet. They went with the AdComm solution.
However, they insisted then and have continued to insist since that much of the equipment they had already purchased could be put to use in the conventional system recommended by AdComm. So they believe they will be able to bring the system in for much less than the projected $3 million.
"It's safe to assume," Paolo said at the time, "that these figures are conservatively high."
Time will tell, although there are positive signs. In March, the county agreed to a $75,900 contract with AdComm to carry out the first of the three phases.
The company met the September deadline for having engineering work done, and officials are now waiting for additional equipment to arrive so it can be installed in October. Testing is projected to begin Nov. 1.
Paolo also estimates that the county will be able to save money because it has a small air fleet - and that makes the county eligible for buying equipment at reduced, bulk rates using prices set by the federal government's General Services Administration. "The GAS pricing is going to be a huge deal for the radio project," he said. "The project will be well under the budget numbers we've projected."
Mac nears finish line
While McMinnville resumed use of its trunked system a couple of years ago, that system continues to represent a work in progress.
Noble concedes it doesn't represent the improvement the city was promised, but said it's still infinitely better than the low-band police and firefighters had been using for the last 50 years.
"Trunked is absolutely where we need to be," Noble insisted. "It is the most efficient use of the radio spectrum."
To some extent, subjectivity comes into play when gauging how good a radio system is working, particularly when there are hundreds of users operating in a variety of situations and locations. It is possible, Noble said, that one officer might regard trunked radio as a pain while another might swear by it.
Sgt. Sandoval makes another point: Of McMinnville's 32 sworn officers, more than a third are young enough that their frame of reference doesn't include the old low-band system.
Noble puts things in an even larger context: "My frame of reference is, there is no perfect radio system," he said. "The physics of radio make it impossible to have a 'perfect' radio system."
As with anything involving Yamhill County's emergency radio system, getting a clear snapshot of where things stand financially is difficult.
Krawczyk offers this assessment:
The $1.43 million from the 2002 levy has been mostly spent. Some $640,000 of that went to the city of McMinnville and McMinnville Rural Fire District as reimbursement for the costs they incurred in developing their own MPT 1327 trunked system.
To date, the county has snagged $1.7 million in grants, mostly from Homeland Security, and has spent $1.1 million of that money.
Not counting $828,000 that has been distributed to partner agencies, he said, the grand total comes for the system comes to $2.53 million.
Farnham thinks that's insane.
"No CEO of any private enterprise would survive the wrath of shareholders if he spent company funds on a project that failed as miserably as this," he told the board in September. He then made a not-so-veiled reference to the upcoming election.
"The same should hold here," he said. "Yamhill County voters should demand full disclosure on this issue and demand accountability from their county commissioners."
Krawczyk offers a different perspective.
"I respectfully disagree with your characterization of the project as a disaster," he wrote back to Farnham in mid-September. "Virtually all of the original equipment, the microwave system and the communication towers purchased for the system are being used in the new system.
"Fire districts are operating on a temporary 450 system using levy equipment. The microwave system is operational, and Mobile Data Terminals have been installed and are in use."
While not addressing the criticisms point-by-point, some officials agree that Farnham's concerns are legitimate, though.
One member of a rural fire board, who asked that his identity be withheld, said "disaster" is exactly the right word.
Yamhill County Sheriff Jack Crabtree said he thinks Farnham is right about something else as well - a post-mortem will be necessary.
That sentiment is echoed by Commissioner Mary Stern, who wasn't on board when the project was launched.
"It's any citizen's right to ask questions, and I think they were good questions," she said. "I think they need to be answered."
Lewis, while acknowledging numerous delays and problems, continues to sound an optimistic note.
Subtracting $827,000 from the 2002 levy that went to McMinnville for its system means that county voters basically paid about $800,000 for a system that ultimately will top $3.1 million by the time everything is said and done, Lewis said. That figure includes some grant sources outside of the $1.7 million that Homeland Security has provided.
"The bottom line is that we already have a system valued at $2.56 million," in exchange for a local tax investment of much less than that, she said. "That's a pretty good deal."
Epilogue
The News-Register provided Walker with a copy of Farnham's questions, but he declined to address any of them. He would say only that anyone making such allegations "should be sure they have their facts straight."
He's declined repeated requests for an interview for this story, saying it was not an "appropriate time."
According to his firm's website, he continues to offer the "highest level" of consulting services.
He goes on to make the following pledge: "Through our commitment, experience and expertise, Monart Associates Inc. has established a business relationship with our customers that will last a lifetime!"
