Improvements to the communications tower on top of Kenai’s Public Safety Building will get underway after the Kenai City Council unanimously approved a resolution authorizing an “innovative procurement procedure” to award a contract to Oregon-based Day Wireless Systems on Wednesday.

According to a memo attached to the resolution, the move follows two unsuccessful efforts to solicit bids to improve the communications tower on top of the building that houses the Kenai Fire and Police departments.

In 2021, per previous Clarion reporting, the Kenai Police Department received around $260,000 in grant funds for an overhaul of its dispatch and mobile radio systems. Manufacturers no longer supported much of the technology being used at the time.

During the Kenai City Council’s meeting on Aug. 7, Kenai Police Chief David Ross said that those improvements were completed in two phases. Radios, consoles and dispatch equipment have already been replaced, but now the remaining work is updating “legacy” equipment.

“It is the antennas that are on the tower, the cables running up the tower and the legacy radios in the server room,” he said.

The memo says that as part of the overhaul, the city learned that the existing tower was “insufficient” to handle the increased load without improvements to its support wires and anchor points.

The city solicited bids for the improvement in January and received no responses, City Manager Terry Eubank told the council on Wednesday. They tried again in March — when they received one bid at “almost double our estimated cost” and greater than the amount budgeted.

As no contract has been awarded, the city’s contract with Motorola for the radio replacement project has been delayed “at least twice,” Eubank said.

“They won’t climb our tower until we complete these upgrades.”

The “innovative procurement” described by the resolution entailed the city’s Public Works Department directly approaching a set of vendors who were recommended by Motorola — soliciting only their ability to do the work and the price.

Day Wireless Systems provided a quote to complete the work at a cost of around $54,000, the resolution says. That’s $59,000 less than the bid received in March and also within the estimated cost of the project.

“I do believe that the city met its obligation to provide a competitive environment for local contractors to provide quotes,” Eubank said. “Considering the timelines in the contract we have with Motorola I’d recommend we approve the innovative procurement and award the contract.”

The council passed the resolution unanimously without further discussion.

A full recording of the meeting, and the text of the resolution, is available at kenai.city.

Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.