Illinois county’s Motorola contract comes under scrutiny
From the Chicago Tribune: The Emergency Telephone System Board of DuPage County, Ill., awarded a no-bid, $7 million contract — funded through fees on landline and cell phone users’ bills — to Motorola. In return, the Schaumburg-based company would build the county a nine-tower, five-channel radio network in 10 months.
But four years later, the cost of the contract has quadrupled to $28.6 million, DuPage is still using its old radio system and the county has abandoned plans for its own network.
The county’s reasoning for signing the hastily approved contract was that a state contract had cleared the way by settling on the lowest prices for the equipment. But a Chicago Tribune review of records found the state contract didn’t include infrastructure such as towers or transmitters and receivers that DuPage needed. Read the entire article here.