LA-RICS P25 system on track for October 2023 acceptance, official says

Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System (LA-RICS) expect to accept the organization’s long-awaited P25 system in less than a year, according to information provided last week to the LA-RICS Joint Powers Agreement (JPA) board.

LA-RICS Executive Director Scott Edson said the P25 system appears to remain on track to be completed by October 2023, although the organization and contractor Motorola Solutions still have not finalized an Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) for the massive mission-critical communications project.

“As you know, all construction is complete or substantially complete, and testing and optimization continues,” Edson said during the JPA board meeting last Thursday. “We’re still in discussions with Motorola [Solutions] on accepting their latest Integrated Master Schedule, which still does not conform to the contract.

“However, it still shows a final acceptance date of October of 2023, so we remain in really good shape.”

All 58 sites in the LA-RICS in the regional P25 network are “substantially complete with P25 construction,” according to the written executive summary of Edson’s update on the LMR project. Of these 58 sites, 52 have been optimized, and 49 are on the air.

Edson said the LA-RICS narrowband data network was scheduled to be the first P25 subsystem to be accepted last month, but that process has been delayed.

“It continues to be pushed out with no impact to the critical path or final acceptance date, thus far,” Edson said, noting that testing of new microwave connectivity is tied to the acceptance of the narrowband data network.

During the JPA meeting, board members also approved a contract amendment with Jacobs Project Management, agreeing to pay the firm $8.7 million to continue to oversee the LA-RICS P25 project through December 2024—a two-year period that is expected to cover network completion, the first year of warranty and project-closeout work.

While the target acceptance date of October 2023 for the LA-RICS P25 system is not new—Edson last year said LA-RICS and Motorola Solutions agreed on the date—the fact that the project remains on the same schedule is notable, given the project’s many delays during the past several years.

LA-RICS officials had expected to accept the finished LMR system in 2020. Early in 2021, LA-RICS received an “information-only” document from Motorola Solutions estimating a project end date of February 2023, according to LA-RICS board minutes.

When asked in June 2021 to explain the reasons for the P25 project being behind schedule, Edson told IWCE’s Urgent Communications, “We were supposed to be done by now, but fires, floods, the pandemic, resources, supply-chain issues and some preventable delays have further delayed the program.”

Edson declined to elaborate on the “preventable delays” he referenced, but the approved minutes from previous board LA-RICS board meetings revealed several points of contention with Motorola Solutions regarding its performance on the project.

Deploying P25 has proven to be a challenging undertaking for LA-RICS, which has been pursuing the goal for more than a decade. After LA-RICS first awarded a $600 million contract for both the LMR and LTE networks to Raytheon in a bidding process initiated in 2010, a legal technicality uncovered in 2011 resulted in both systems being procured separately.

When the LMR project was rebid, Motorola Solutions was select and signed a contract with LA-RICS for the LMR system in August 2013. Motorola Solutions subsequently also was chosen to build the LTE network, signing a contract to deploy the LA-RICS broadband wireless in March 2014.

The scope of both the P25 and LTE networks for LA-RICS were reduced significantly in 2015—largely by redesign on the LTE side of the project in the spring of that year—in part because of claims of RF dangers from the local firefighters’ union. The 232-site LTE plan was pared to 77 sites and eventually 76 sites. In 2018, the 76 sites were transferred to AT&T for FirstNet, and LA-RICS later built another 26 LTE sites that were transferred to AT&T for the FirstNet initiative.

Meanwhile, the LA-RICS P25 project was reduced from more than 80 sites to its current 58-site configuration, in part because the city of Los Angeles opted to pull out of the regional initiative in November 2015.