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SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — A former Executive Director of Salt Lake City 911 shared his firsthand experience with some of the challenges regarding Utah’s new statewide communications system.
2News has been covering the reported issues from first responders involving the new system after learning of the ongoing radio failures and coverage concerns in the last few months.
“This is just one of the cases, I just thought, ‘man, I told you so,” said Stephen Meyer, who worked at SLC 911 for roughly two years. “Anyone that was involved in the planning in this, could see this coming.”
Meyer said Utah Communications Authority rolled out a previous statewide 9-1-1 system that was “plagued with problems. Meyer mentioned Salt Lake City planned to overhaul their own radio communications system at one point.
“For Salt Lake, it made more sense for us to go it alone,” Meyer said. “Well UCA got involved and they threatened the city administration that they were going to come forward and go through the legislative process and basically force us to go with them if we don’t ‘play nice’.”
Meyer said that Salt Lake City didn’t want to risk a loss of funding which resulted in the city moving forward with UCA’s new statewide radio project. Meyer says that he, along with the Salt Lake City police and fire chiefs objected to the move.
“UCA has publicly threatened, publicly behind-the-scenes has threatened agencies with funding, political retribution, legislative action, if you don’t go along with them, they’re going to find a way to make you go along with them,” Meyer said. “For these agencies, especially the smaller ones, they don’t have the tax money coming in, they don’t have the dollars where they can make up for that loss of funding. Salt Lake City would have probably been able to figure it out.”
Meyer has seen some of 2News’ coverage on the issues being reported by first responders and wanted to speak out.
“I think anyone that would put these political decisions above the brave men and women who are out there protecting us, whether they’re on the fire side or the police side, they should be ashamed the way this project was handed,” Meyer said. “The system frankly shouldn’t have even been launched without better testing being done to make sure that these types of things weren’t going to happen.”
Meyer believes the problems with the system could continue for ‘a while’, citing the scale of the system and the fixes required.
Meyer, who joined SLC 911 in 2021, said he was terminated in 2023 over voicing concerns about various projects brought forward by communications departments and centers, including Salt Lake Valley Emergency Communications Center. “While I was on FMLA, I was terminated for not engaging with the other center,” Meyer said about his termination.
“There are certain risks that we can’t control. We can’t control the bad guys with guns, we can’t control the structure fires, but we can control the radio issue,” Meyer said. “We can control the politics that gets involved and standing in the way of making these things go forward, right?”
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