SUMMARY OF PUBLIC OUTREACH EFFORTS CONCERNING STATE AND LOCAL PUBLIC SAFETY SPECTRUM MANAGEMENT POLICIES & PROCEDURES

As required by the President’s Executive Memorandum on the Spectrum Policy Initiative, the Department of Commerce, through NTIA, conducted outreach in the form of public meetings to help in the development of recommendations to improve the public safety spectrum management process. Two separate events were held to solicit input. The first meeting, a Roundtable discussion with State and local public safety frequency coordinators, national public safety organizations, and public safety agencies, was held on November 12, 2003. The second meeting, held on February 10-11, 2004, included a much broader participation from the public safety community, academia, manufacturers, and the general public.

From these meetings, a comprehensive set of findings was extracted and are represented below. Specific supporting findings are detailed in Section 3. The combined findings of these two outreach efforts should be considered as broad in scope based on a limited investigation into the spectrum management issues of State and local public safety as they related to the four objectives in the memorandum. They are generally representative of the public safety community, but are not intended to be a finite and limiting set. Throughout the United States, there are reportedly as many as 55,000 public safety agencies of varying size, mission, and structure. Each has unique problems and solutions regarding its own communications requirements, issues and solutions. It may be unfair and unrealistic to assume that these findings are completely representative of this extraordinarily large base of users.