Inspector general launches audit of multi-city police radio system after concerns it won’t work

PALM BEACH, FL — The county’s inspector general has launched a wide-ranging audit of a multi-city police radio system, after disputes among city officials and technical advisers over whether the radios will put officers’ lives in jeopardy.

Inspector General Sheryl Steckler said Monday her office began auditing the consortium of city representatives setting up the OpenSky radio system, after a series of Palm Beach Post articles detailed how West Palm Beach officials buried critical reports by their own technical team. West Palm is now looking to drop out of the consortium, despite having already invested $5 million in OpenSky.

“We’ll follow the money,” Steckler said. “There’s a very large communication system that not everyone is happy about. There could be safety issues here with radios not working in certain areas.

“We don’t even know how the system was procured. There are so many elements to the purchase into the system from the very beginning of how it even came about to the deliverables and whether people actually got what they thought (they were getting).”

Ernie Carr, a Palm Beach Gardens colonel and executive director of the consortium, said he welcomes the audit.

“I’ve always tried to be very upfront, answer any questions and provide any documents we’ve got,” Carr said. “In the final analysis, I still believe they’re going to see that we’ve got a system that West Palm helped design and implement. West Palm today doesn’t like that design.”

The Office of Inspector General will review financial information dating from 1999, when the consortium was created, to the present day. The audit will be the largest to date for the office, which was opened in May 2010 as part of a sweeping series of anti-corruption reforms in Palm Beach County. Voters in November 2010 placed all 38 municipalities throughout the county under the office’s oversight.

“This is a great opportunity for us to do an audit across boundaries where our jurisdiction reaches all entities and we’re able to do in one fell swoop,” Steckler said.

Dennis Schindel, director of audits for the inspector general’s office, said he plans to have an initial meeting with consortium leaders and officials from the various cities within the next week. He said he hopes to release interim results as soon as possible.

“It will be beneficial to the stakeholders still in the game who are making decisions going forward,” Schindel said. “Something like this that goes back so far and involves so many entities, that it’s going to take a while to sift through all of this.”

Initially all Palm Beach County cities and towns with police departments were a part of the consortium. All have since opted out, except Palm Beach Gardens, Jupiter, Juno Beach, Atlantis, Palm Beach and West Palm Beach. The Palm Beach County School District also has stayed with the consortium.

“There seems to be two distinct opinions (about OpenSky): One, that it works fine, and then there’s a group very much opposed to it,” said Schindel. “So we’re hoping to add an objective assessment to the two very different opinions.”

Former Police Chief Delsa Bush, the city’s biggest OpenSky advocate, resigned earlier this month after a public disagreement with West Palm Beach Mayor Jeri Muoio about it. Since then, consortium leaders and Palm Beach Mayor Gail Coniglio have lobbied West Palm Beach to stay with OpenSky.

Although Muoio said her staff will recommend the city opt out of the consortium, city commissioners still have the final vote. The decision they must weigh is whether to opt out or stay in and pay an additional $1.6 million needed for radios.

If the city opts out, it will have to find its own system or join the county system. Both options could cost more than $5 million, on top of $5 million already spent on OpenSky.

On Monday, Commissioner Kimberly Mitchell said an audit could lend needed balance to the debate.

“It will be a good thing to have a third party objectively look at all of it,” Mitchell said. “Otherwise it’s just ‘he said, she said,’ and it’s a very difficult thing to maneuver. We have a lot of other entities involved, like the Town of Palm Beach and Palm Beach Gardens, who made commitments years ago. We can’t just wholesale, universally, turn and go in a different direction without understanding all those parts and how they’re connected.”

Read the full story here.

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