Communication Breakdown, Part I
By DAVID BATES
October 11, 2007
NOTE: This is the first installment in a 2-part package that was published by the News-Register in October 2007. It included several sidebars and an accompanying column. The second part is available upon request.
During the first week of January 2003, Art Walker drove up High Heaven Road about five miles northwest of McMinnville.
He wouldn't have a signed contract with Yamhill County for a few more days. But he was already working on a massive upgrade of the emergency communications system, which the Yamhill Communications Agency's 911 center uses to dispatch local police and fire agencies and those agencies used to coordinate activities in the field.
Later, he noted on his expense sheet that the trip was for pre-engineering work at the High Heaven site, one of several high-elevation locations around the county where equipment would be mounted on towers for a communications system featuring the latest in trunking technology.
Voters had approved a $1.4 million levy for the project three months earlier, in November 2002. Of that amount, $125,383 was allocated to Walker for consulting work.
A few weeks after Walker's High Heaven trip, officials started buying equipment. For the next 542 days, more than 70 purchase orders flew out of the Yamhill County Courthouse, carrying a total value of nearly $925,000, documents show.
But the project spiraled into a fiasco of mind-boggling complexity.
"The perfect storm"
Walker's bill would ultimately top $190,000 before the county cut all ties with him in January 2006, but the county refused to pay all of it.
So most of the $1.4 million was spent long ago.
However, as the fifth anniversary of the election nears, the YCOM dispatch center - an independent, self-contained agency that is actually separate from the county - still isn't using the system that the levy was intended to pay for. Neither is the Yamhill County Sheriff's Office, nor most of the small-town police departments or rural fire districts.
The city of McMinnville, which veered off on its own early on, began operating on the trunked system in December 2004, following a trial run a year earlier that proved unsuccessful. However, it has never been able to work out all the bugs.
The county's rural fire agencies finally began using the system in conventional mode in September 2005, almost four years after passage of the levy. But they rely on a jury-rigged network of temporary fixes cobbled together just to get them up on the system, not on the permanent network envisioned when the levy won approval.
What's more, a significant amount of additional investment, to the tune of $1.7 million, has been necessary.
Yamhill County has, since 2003, spent $2.53 million on local radio infrastructure. Where the final cost will come in is anyone's guess.
Some equipment has been installed. Some is still sitting in storage at the county shop on Lafayette Avenue in McMinnville, with the expectation that it will be finally be installed later this month.
Using money scraped together from U.S. Homeland Security grants, the county has recently purchased more equipment to finish the project and fulfill the promise made to voters five years ago.
Officials have talked about seeking legal recourse against Walker, but Yamhill County Counsel John Gray has advised against it. He declines to discuss his reasoning.
For his part, Walker's not talking.
One system, many players
The narrative conveyed by local officials over the years features Walker as the fall guy for the failures and delays that have dogged the project. But it's actually not that simple.
A broader picture emerges from a review by the News-Register of nearly 1,000 pages of documents, coupled with interviews with scores of people involved in or familiar with the project. And it's not a pretty one.
It's no stretch to call the juxtaposition of events a perfect bureaucratic storm - a confluence of forces coming in the right place at the wrong time.
The complexity of the story is illustrated by the sheer number of players.
Virtually every level of government - city, county, state and federal - has been involved. Dozens of individual decisionmakers, some of them elected and many not, have played roles.
Yamhill County was at the eye of the storm, but other players included Polk County, Washington County, the Yamhill County Sheriff's Office, McMinnville's police and fire departments, the West Valley Fire District, the Oregon State Police, the Oregon Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals, several attorneys and more than 40 far-flung vendors.
"It was like the perfect storm, to be honest with you," confirmed one high-ranking official who insisted the comment not be pegged to him.
Officials say there's no such thing as a perfect radio system. They also note that in a project of this magnitude, things invariably arise that can add weeks, months and even years to the process.
"They ran into issues they were unable to anticipate," said Ray Fields, who chairs the McMinnville Rural Fire District Board and has experience in the radio industry. "It has taken much more time to resolve those issues than one would expect."
But consider the context offered by Southern Oregon's Douglas County, where Roseburg straddles I-5 and their equivalent of YCOM dispatches to about 50 agencies spread out over more than 5,000 square miles of hilly terrain stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Douglas County was relying on a 35-year-old system that was constantly breaking down. So officials scraped together millions from state and federal sources, hired a consulting firm and had a new, functioning radio system in place within four years of settling on a plan.
They never asked voters for a dime. Their original cost estimate was $9.4 million, but they brought it in at less than $8 million.
They built a trunked system, using the digital radio technology Yamhill County originally intended to use, but has now scrapped.
While it didn't come without bugs, Douglas County Communication Director Ray Duncan - who has made several trips to McMinnville to advise local officials - says it boosted radio coverage countywide from 62 to 95 percent. He said virtually everyone is happy with it.
Here, it's a different story.
The 2000 levy
Officials in Yamhill County have been talking about radios for well over a decade. By the late 1990s, the existing system was nearly 50 years old and showing every bit of its age.
Police officers, firefighters and medics frequently found themselves in "dead spots," putting them at serious and even life-threatening risk, unable to speak either with each other or YCOM dispatchers operating out of the basement of the McMinnville Police Department - or both. And because the equipment was so old, finding replacement parts was difficult.
Radio signals are basically electromagnetic waves propagated by an antenna. Waves have varying frequencies, which are measured in megahertz.
Since World War II, local police and fire agencies had been equipped with radios using frequencies in the low-band 30-46 MHz range. For context, AM radio stations broadcast at less than 2 MHz, Citizens' Band radios broadcast around 27 MHz, the part of the spectrum used by FM radio runs from 88 to 108 MHz and many police and fire agencies have gone to 800 MHz - ultra high band.
Officials were determined to move to a higher band.
In February 2000, following considerable public discussion, former Yamhill County Commissioners Robert Johnstone, Ted Lopuszynski and Tom Bunn created the Yamhill Emergency Communications District, a special service district with taxing authority, with themselves directors by default. The purpose was to create a new legal entity that excluded Newberg and Dundee, which were already served by a modern 800 MHz system.
The came up with a $7.6 million 800 MHz package and presented it to voters as Measure 36-12 in the fall. It was the first local level of the new century - indeed, the new millennium.
The levy failed 54 percent to 46 percent, but some officials saw a silver lining in the defeat. Voters in McMinnville, who tend to be more generous with their tax dollars at the ballot box, gave it majority approval.
Nothing would have prevented the county from floating a levy earlier, of course, but officials would have run into the double-majority rule, a provision of Bill Sizemore's "cut-and-cap" anti-tax initiative, Measure 47.
In other words, a majority of registered voters would have to cast ballots - always a chore in special elections - and a majority of them would have to support it. Otherwise, they'd have to wait for the November general election of the next even-numbered year.
So that set the stage for November 2002.
One system, two paths
In anticipation of that, the city and county signed a $47,500 contract with Walker's consulting firm, Monart Associates, to come up with an engineering plan for a very high-tech, cutting-edge solution: a trunked 450 Megahertz system.
Trunked radio employs digital technology to maximize available capacity in a two-way radio system. It's an offshoot of an old concept that originated in the telephone industry.
Wikipedia offers what Fields calls an excellent description: A protocol precisely defines the relationship between the actual radios and the system backbone. The protocol allows the system to automatically pick a frequency for each radio transmission, depending on what's available at that moment.
Conventional radio, on the other hand, uses a fixed channel, which must be selected by the user.
At the time, trunked radio was in its earliest stages in the United States, but already had something of a track record in Europe. By January 2002, Walker had decided to recommend the MPT 1327, a trunked system designed in Britain.
Addressing the McMinnville City Council, he termed the price reasonable. He said the system would meet the city's needs for the next 15 years.
McMinnville officials were taken with the idea. And for reasons not completely clear, they decided they didn't want to wait until the November general election.
As a result, the road toward an emergency communications upgrade in Yamhill County forked in the summer of 2002. More precisely, one player on the team decide to sprint on ahead, leaving the other to catch up later.
The city of McMinnville got its trunked system to work, though more successfully on the fire side than the police side, and not without encountering bugs that are still being addressed today. In the face of unending problems and delays, the county never built out the trunked system, and has since decided to junk it.
Yamhill County had been in on the deal with Walker to engineer a trunked system. However, Yamhill County Administrator John Krawczyk said it was the city's decision to forge ahead on its own that settled the question at the time.
"In 2002, we felt we had little choice but to follow McMinnville's lead," he said. So on Aug. 22, county commissioners, acting as the Yamhill Emergency Communications District Board, voted 2-1 to put a 3-year, $1.4 million levy on the November ballot.
Robert Johnstone and Leslie Lewis, who had ousted Lopuszynski two years earlier, supported it. Tom Bunn voted no, insisting that officials had not fully explored other funding options.
Less than a week later, the McMinnville City Council approved $364,966 in contracts with four companies for its piece of the MPT 1327 system - without going to voters. The city piece included a new tower - the big one rising from the south side of the McMinnville Fire Station - along with new equipment at an existing tower on High Heaven and radios for both voice and data transmission.
A failure to plan
Voter approval of the district levy in November allowed the project to officially begin in January 2003. That's when Walker began visiting tower sites and commissioners signed off on a consulting contract with him.
The project was supposed to take less than 18 months. But interviews with officials, vendors and other involved parties suggest Yamhill County was already on shaky ground before the contract was even signed.
For all the talk leading up to commissioners' decision to put a levy on the ballot, and there was plenty of it, there was, officials now concede, a failure to plan accordingly.
Murray Paolo, the county's information systems manager, was eventually tapped by commissioners to replace Walker.
He's a self-described fiscal conservative, a reputation burnished during his years on the Yamhill-Carlton School Board. He's also widely known as a workaholic, a quick study and a relentlessly efficient performer of tasks coming his way.
When he tackled the radio project after the county cut Walker loose, he advised officials to first conduct a professional needs analysis before doing anything more - something he pointedly observed had not already been done.
Officials say that to the best of their knowledge at the time, Walker had done all of the preliminary work that needed doing.
But that work didn't include a comprehensive analysis of the actual needs of the county's radio users. "No formal needs analysis was completed prior to engaging Monart Associates for the project," confirmed Krawczyk, who worked closely with Walker during the project's initial planning.
One former official, who asked to remain anonymous, likened that to paying a contractor to build a house without knowing what the completed structure would look like.
Without hearing Walker's version of the story, it's impossible to know exactly what he had in mind. But his buy-first, ask-questions-later approach quickly led to a snafu over the number of radios that would actually be needed.
Documents suggest the system Walker had in mind heading into the 2002 election would require 214 radios. It's not clear how many were intended to be vehicle-mounted and how many hand-held, or how Walker intended they be allocated.
However, a survey to determine user needs wasn't done until 2003 - the year after the election. It pegged the number at 264.
What's more, that assessment apparently didn't come to commissioners' attention until May 2005 - two more years down the road. In a May 2005 briefing, Krawczyk broke the news to commissioners that the project was over budget and the need for additional radios was a key reason.
"It just made sense"
The county had no reason to be suspicious about Monart Associates Inc. going into the project. The deficiencies in the project didn't become apparent until later.
Walker, a 25-year veteran of the Oregon State Police who retired in 1996, came to Yamhill County by way of McMinnville, where he appears to have forged a good working relationship.
Initially, he was recommended by Rod Brown, who oversaw the YCOM emergency communications system in his capacity as the city's police chief until his retirement in 2002. Management of the agency reorganized early in 2006, putting the sheriff in charge.
"Art was the principal consultant on the first levy," said McMinnville Fire Chief Jay Lilly, who took over for Brown as head of the YCOM operation. "It just made sense to maintain that relationship with the consultant you'd already spent so much time with."
That was clearly the county's thinking, too.
Walker had worked for the county previously, adding to the appeal. Prior to the November 2000 radio levy election, the county had hired Monart for about $24,000 of consulting work.
Virtually all of the key managers, both with the city and county, are candid about their ignorance of the increasingly complex workings of modern emergency communication systems. They were then, and remain today, largely beholden to those who claim expertise - the engineers, the consultants, and so forth.
Some think that was taken to an unnecessary extreme, however.
Vendor Tait Radios Inc., whose executives feel they got an undeserved black eye from the bad press about the project, said it's unusual in their experience for a consultant to hold the degree of authority granted Walker.
Company official Doug Chapman said Tait prefers to work directly with the people who will be using its product, not go through an intermediary. Today, in fact, officials from both the county and McMinnville say they're working closely with Tait on getting the bugs out of the city's portion of the system and resolving the county's problems with its portion.
"Tait has been extremely helpful to us," said McMinnville Police Chief Ron Noble, heading an agency that is already using the trunked system. "Frankly, they don't care if we have trunked or conventional. They just want us to be able to talk to each other."
But on the county side, that wasn't always the case. Chapman said most of his correspondence on the project was with Walker - not with county officials or radio users.
"I only got all of my marching orders through Art," he said. That, he said, was an unusual way of doing business.
Sgt. Rhonda Sandoval of the McMinnville police, who "has learned more about radios than I ever wanted to know" in the last few years, echoes his sentiments.
"If you buy Kenwood equipment, Kenwood installs it," she said. "The company won't let anyone else install its equipment. I personally believe that a lot of our problems stemmed from the fact that we didn't have the manufacturer install the equipment."
So who installed it?
"Oh, it was that consultant," she said. "Art Walker."
Great expectations
Walker's nine-page contract with Yamhill County spelled out the expectations pretty clearly.
The county agreed to pay him $125,383, plus authorized, work-related expenses. His job included:
• Design an MPT 1327 trunked radio system, which entailed upgrades to tower sites at Doane Creek and Mountain Top Drive and installation of microwave equipment at each allowing for transmission to McMinnville's High Heaven tower.
• Reserve new radio frequencies from the Federal Communications Commission.
• Handle all requests for proposals, bid specs, pricing, contracts and other related documents.
• Provide "complete project management" from inception to completion, including all construction of buildings and towers, equipment installation, programming and testing.
Walker was to be paid in three installments of $41,794 each, the first up front, the second at the beginning of "actual system construction" or July 2003, whichever came first, and the third on completion of the project.
The county "anticipated" the system would be up and working by Nov. 1, 2003, though the contract didn't set a specific target date.
From the outset, officials gave Walker - and the duration of the project - some wiggle room.
The contract was to expire after 18 months, at the end of June 2004, but gave the county the option of extending it. And it provided for "optional" work on the system that was deemed "outside the scope of the contract" at a rate of $92 per hour.
By the time Walker's relationship with the county ended more than three years later, expense records examined by the News-Register show that he'd billed them for more than $73,000 for work deemed "outside scope of contract."
County officials say the final tally actually approached $87,000.
During the first week of January 2003, Art Walker drove up High Heaven Road about five miles northwest of McMinnville.
He wouldn't have a signed contract with Yamhill County for a few more days. But he was already working on a massive upgrade of the emergency communications system, which the Yamhill Communications Agency's 911 center uses to dispatch local police and fire agencies and those agencies used to coordinate activities in the field.
Later, he noted on his expense sheet that the trip was for pre-engineering work at the High Heaven site, one of several high-elevation locations around the county where equipment would be mounted on towers for a communications system featuring the latest in trunking technology.
Voters had approved a $1.4 million levy for the project three months earlier, in November 2002. Of that amount, $125,383 was allocated to Walker for consulting work.
A few weeks after Walker's High Heaven trip, officials started buying equipment. For the next 542 days, more than 70 purchase orders flew out of the Yamhill County Courthouse, carrying a total value of nearly $925,000, documents show.
But the project spiraled into a fiasco of mind-boggling complexity.
"The perfect storm"
Walker's bill would ultimately top $190,000 before the county cut all ties with him in January 2006, but the county refused to pay all of it.
So most of the $1.4 million was spent long ago.
However, as the fifth anniversary of the election nears, the YCOM dispatch center - an independent, self-contained agency that is actually separate from the county - still isn't using the system that the levy was intended to pay for. Neither is the Yamhill County Sheriff's Office, nor most of the small-town police departments or rural fire districts.
The city of McMinnville, which veered off on its own early on, began operating on the trunked system in December 2004, following a trial run a year earlier that proved unsuccessful. However, it has never been able to work out all the bugs.
The county's rural fire agencies finally began using the system in conventional mode in September 2005, almost four years after passage of the levy. But they rely on a jury-rigged network of temporary fixes cobbled together just to get them up on the system, not on the permanent network envisioned when the levy won approval.
What's more, a significant amount of additional investment, to the tune of $1.7 million, has been necessary.
Yamhill County has, since 2003, spent $2.53 million on local radio infrastructure. Where the final cost will come in is anyone's guess.
Some equipment has been installed. Some is still sitting in storage at the county shop on Lafayette Avenue in McMinnville, with the expectation that it will be finally be installed later this month.
Using money scraped together from U.S. Homeland Security grants, the county has recently purchased more equipment to finish the project and fulfill the promise made to voters five years ago.
Officials have talked about seeking legal recourse against Walker, but Yamhill County Counsel John Gray has advised against it. He declines to discuss his reasoning.
For his part, Walker's not talking.
One system, many players
The narrative conveyed by local officials over the years features Walker as the fall guy for the failures and delays that have dogged the project. But it's actually not that simple.
A broader picture emerges from a review by the News-Register of nearly 1,000 pages of documents, coupled with interviews with scores of people involved in or familiar with the project. And it's not a pretty one.
It's no stretch to call the juxtaposition of events a perfect bureaucratic storm - a confluence of forces coming in the right place at the wrong time.
The complexity of the story is illustrated by the sheer number of players.
Virtually every level of government - city, county, state and federal - has been involved. Dozens of individual decisionmakers, some of them elected and many not, have played roles.
Yamhill County was at the eye of the storm, but other players included Polk County, Washington County, the Yamhill County Sheriff's Office, McMinnville's police and fire departments, the West Valley Fire District, the Oregon State Police, the Oregon Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals, several attorneys and more than 40 far-flung vendors.
"It was like the perfect storm, to be honest with you," confirmed one high-ranking official who insisted the comment not be pegged to him.
Officials say there's no such thing as a perfect radio system. They also note that in a project of this magnitude, things invariably arise that can add weeks, months and even years to the process.
"They ran into issues they were unable to anticipate," said Ray Fields, who chairs the McMinnville Rural Fire District Board and has experience in the radio industry. "It has taken much more time to resolve those issues than one would expect."
But consider the context offered by Southern Oregon's Douglas County, where Roseburg straddles I-5 and their equivalent of YCOM dispatches to about 50 agencies spread out over more than 5,000 square miles of hilly terrain stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Douglas County was relying on a 35-year-old system that was constantly breaking down. So officials scraped together millions from state and federal sources, hired a consulting firm and had a new, functioning radio system in place within four years of settling on a plan.
They never asked voters for a dime. Their original cost estimate was $9.4 million, but they brought it in at less than $8 million.
They built a trunked system, using the digital radio technology Yamhill County originally intended to use, but has now scrapped.
While it didn't come without bugs, Douglas County Communication Director Ray Duncan - who has made several trips to McMinnville to advise local officials - says it boosted radio coverage countywide from 62 to 95 percent. He said virtually everyone is happy with it.
Here, it's a different story.
The 2000 levy
Officials in Yamhill County have been talking about radios for well over a decade. By the late 1990s, the existing system was nearly 50 years old and showing every bit of its age.
Police officers, firefighters and medics frequently found themselves in "dead spots," putting them at serious and even life-threatening risk, unable to speak either with each other or YCOM dispatchers operating out of the basement of the McMinnville Police Department - or both. And because the equipment was so old, finding replacement parts was difficult.
Radio signals are basically electromagnetic waves propagated by an antenna. Waves have varying frequencies, which are measured in megahertz.
Since World War II, local police and fire agencies had been equipped with radios using frequencies in the low-band 30-46 MHz range. For context, AM radio stations broadcast at less than 2 MHz, Citizens' Band radios broadcast around 27 MHz, the part of the spectrum used by FM radio runs from 88 to 108 MHz and many police and fire agencies have gone to 800 MHz - ultra high band.
Officials were determined to move to a higher band.
In February 2000, following considerable public discussion, former Yamhill County Commissioners Robert Johnstone, Ted Lopuszynski and Tom Bunn created the Yamhill Emergency Communications District, a special service district with taxing authority, with themselves directors by default. The purpose was to create a new legal entity that excluded Newberg and Dundee, which were already served by a modern 800 MHz system.
The came up with a $7.6 million 800 MHz package and presented it to voters as Measure 36-12 in the fall. It was the first local level of the new century - indeed, the new millennium.
The levy failed 54 percent to 46 percent, but some officials saw a silver lining in the defeat. Voters in McMinnville, who tend to be more generous with their tax dollars at the ballot box, gave it majority approval.
Nothing would have prevented the county from floating a levy earlier, of course, but officials would have run into the double-majority rule, a provision of Bill Sizemore's "cut-and-cap" anti-tax initiative, Measure 47.
In other words, a majority of registered voters would have to cast ballots - always a chore in special elections - and a majority of them would have to support it. Otherwise, they'd have to wait for the November general election of the next even-numbered year.
So that set the stage for November 2002.
One system, two paths
In anticipation of that, the city and county signed a $47,500 contract with Walker's consulting firm, Monart Associates, to come up with an engineering plan for a very high-tech, cutting-edge solution: a trunked 450 Megahertz system.
Trunked radio employs digital technology to maximize available capacity in a two-way radio system. It's an offshoot of an old concept that originated in the telephone industry.
Wikipedia offers what Fields calls an excellent description: A protocol precisely defines the relationship between the actual radios and the system backbone. The protocol allows the system to automatically pick a frequency for each radio transmission, depending on what's available at that moment.
Conventional radio, on the other hand, uses a fixed channel, which must be selected by the user.
At the time, trunked radio was in its earliest stages in the United States, but already had something of a track record in Europe. By January 2002, Walker had decided to recommend the MPT 1327, a trunked system designed in Britain.
Addressing the McMinnville City Council, he termed the price reasonable. He said the system would meet the city's needs for the next 15 years.
McMinnville officials were taken with the idea. And for reasons not completely clear, they decided they didn't want to wait until the November general election.
As a result, the road toward an emergency communications upgrade in Yamhill County forked in the summer of 2002. More precisely, one player on the team decide to sprint on ahead, leaving the other to catch up later.
The city of McMinnville got its trunked system to work, though more successfully on the fire side than the police side, and not without encountering bugs that are still being addressed today. In the face of unending problems and delays, the county never built out the trunked system, and has since decided to junk it.
Yamhill County had been in on the deal with Walker to engineer a trunked system. However, Yamhill County Administrator John Krawczyk said it was the city's decision to forge ahead on its own that settled the question at the time.
"In 2002, we felt we had little choice but to follow McMinnville's lead," he said. So on Aug. 22, county commissioners, acting as the Yamhill Emergency Communications District Board, voted 2-1 to put a 3-year, $1.4 million levy on the November ballot.
Robert Johnstone and Leslie Lewis, who had ousted Lopuszynski two years earlier, supported it. Tom Bunn voted no, insisting that officials had not fully explored other funding options.
Less than a week later, the McMinnville City Council approved $364,966 in contracts with four companies for its piece of the MPT 1327 system - without going to voters. The city piece included a new tower - the big one rising from the south side of the McMinnville Fire Station - along with new equipment at an existing tower on High Heaven and radios for both voice and data transmission.
A failure to plan
Voter approval of the district levy in November allowed the project to officially begin in January 2003. That's when Walker began visiting tower sites and commissioners signed off on a consulting contract with him.
The project was supposed to take less than 18 months. But interviews with officials, vendors and other involved parties suggest Yamhill County was already on shaky ground before the contract was even signed.
For all the talk leading up to commissioners' decision to put a levy on the ballot, and there was plenty of it, there was, officials now concede, a failure to plan accordingly.
Murray Paolo, the county's information systems manager, was eventually tapped by commissioners to replace Walker.
He's a self-described fiscal conservative, a reputation burnished during his years on the Yamhill-Carlton School Board. He's also widely known as a workaholic, a quick study and a relentlessly efficient performer of tasks coming his way.
When he tackled the radio project after the county cut Walker loose, he advised officials to first conduct a professional needs analysis before doing anything more - something he pointedly observed had not already been done.
Officials say that to the best of their knowledge at the time, Walker had done all of the preliminary work that needed doing.
But that work didn't include a comprehensive analysis of the actual needs of the county's radio users. "No formal needs analysis was completed prior to engaging Monart Associates for the project," confirmed Krawczyk, who worked closely with Walker during the project's initial planning.
One former official, who asked to remain anonymous, likened that to paying a contractor to build a house without knowing what the completed structure would look like.
Without hearing Walker's version of the story, it's impossible to know exactly what he had in mind. But his buy-first, ask-questions-later approach quickly led to a snafu over the number of radios that would actually be needed.
Documents suggest the system Walker had in mind heading into the 2002 election would require 214 radios. It's not clear how many were intended to be vehicle-mounted and how many hand-held, or how Walker intended they be allocated.
However, a survey to determine user needs wasn't done until 2003 - the year after the election. It pegged the number at 264.
What's more, that assessment apparently didn't come to commissioners' attention until May 2005 - two more years down the road. In a May 2005 briefing, Krawczyk broke the news to commissioners that the project was over budget and the need for additional radios was a key reason.
"It just made sense"
The county had no reason to be suspicious about Monart Associates Inc. going into the project. The deficiencies in the project didn't become apparent until later.
Walker, a 25-year veteran of the Oregon State Police who retired in 1996, came to Yamhill County by way of McMinnville, where he appears to have forged a good working relationship.
Initially, he was recommended by Rod Brown, who oversaw the YCOM emergency communications system in his capacity as the city's police chief until his retirement in 2002. Management of the agency reorganized early in 2006, putting the sheriff in charge.
"Art was the principal consultant on the first levy," said McMinnville Fire Chief Jay Lilly, who took over for Brown as head of the YCOM operation. "It just made sense to maintain that relationship with the consultant you'd already spent so much time with."
That was clearly the county's thinking, too.
Walker had worked for the county previously, adding to the appeal. Prior to the November 2000 radio levy election, the county had hired Monart for about $24,000 of consulting work.
Virtually all of the key managers, both with the city and county, are candid about their ignorance of the increasingly complex workings of modern emergency communication systems. They were then, and remain today, largely beholden to those who claim expertise - the engineers, the consultants, and so forth.
Some think that was taken to an unnecessary extreme, however.
Vendor Tait Radios Inc., whose executives feel they got an undeserved black eye from the bad press about the project, said it's unusual in their experience for a consultant to hold the degree of authority granted Walker.
Company official Doug Chapman said Tait prefers to work directly with the people who will be using its product, not go through an intermediary. Today, in fact, officials from both the county and McMinnville say they're working closely with Tait on getting the bugs out of the city's portion of the system and resolving the county's problems with its portion.
"Tait has been extremely helpful to us," said McMinnville Police Chief Ron Noble, heading an agency that is already using the trunked system. "Frankly, they don't care if we have trunked or conventional. They just want us to be able to talk to each other."
But on the county side, that wasn't always the case. Chapman said most of his correspondence on the project was with Walker - not with county officials or radio users.
"I only got all of my marching orders through Art," he said. That, he said, was an unusual way of doing business.
Sgt. Rhonda Sandoval of the McMinnville police, who "has learned more about radios than I ever wanted to know" in the last few years, echoes his sentiments.
"If you buy Kenwood equipment, Kenwood installs it," she said. "The company won't let anyone else install its equipment. I personally believe that a lot of our problems stemmed from the fact that we didn't have the manufacturer install the equipment."
So who installed it?
"Oh, it was that consultant," she said. "Art Walker."
Great expectations
Walker's nine-page contract with Yamhill County spelled out the expectations pretty clearly.
The county agreed to pay him $125,383, plus authorized, work-related expenses. His job included:
• Design an MPT 1327 trunked radio system, which entailed upgrades to tower sites at Doane Creek and Mountain Top Drive and installation of microwave equipment at each allowing for transmission to McMinnville's High Heaven tower.
• Reserve new radio frequencies from the Federal Communications Commission.
• Handle all requests for proposals, bid specs, pricing, contracts and other related documents.
• Provide "complete project management" from inception to completion, including all construction of buildings and towers, equipment installation, programming and testing.
Walker was to be paid in three installments of $41,794 each, the first up front, the second at the beginning of "actual system construction" or July 2003, whichever came first, and the third on completion of the project.
The county "anticipated" the system would be up and working by Nov. 1, 2003, though the contract didn't set a specific target date.
From the outset, officials gave Walker - and the duration of the project - some wiggle room.
The contract was to expire after 18 months, at the end of June 2004, but gave the county the option of extending it. And it provided for "optional" work on the system that was deemed "outside the scope of the contract" at a rate of $92 per hour.
By the time Walker's relationship with the county ended more than three years later, expense records examined by the News-Register show that he'd billed them for more than $73,000 for work deemed "outside scope of contract."
County officials say the final tally actually approached $87,000.
