That’s a problem, according to Wright County Sheriff Jason Schluttenhofer.

“The worst thing you can have happen is you have a police officer out in the middle of the night and he’s got to use his cell phone because his radio does not work,” Schluttenhofer said. “Or you are at an accident scene and you can’t get an ambulance out.”

Schluttenhofer said that in Wright County it’s something that happens too often.

“It happens daily,” he said.

To fix the problem, Wright County has taken ownership of a radio tower near Eagle Grove.

Schluttenhofer presented information relating to the purchase at a Wright County Board of Supervisors in late August.

“We found out FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) was going to decommission a bunch of their FAA towers,” he said. “I reached out to them to figure out what it would cost to purchase something like that. We had it inspected. It passed our inspections, so at that point we went through the FAA to purchase the tower.”

The FAA agreed to sell the tower and the land it sits on. The cost for the land is $49,999. The cost of the tower is $1.

The purchase agreement is expected to become official soon.

Schluttenhofer said the purchase will result in savings for the county.

“It probably saved us $350,000 to be able to purchase it, so we didn’t have to build our own,” he said.

Supervisor Karl Helgevold credited Schluttenhofer for the pending transaction.

“Huge savings and for Sheriff Schluttenhofer, that was great research by him,” Helgevold said.

Some of the problems experienced in Wright County are attributed to changes brought about by the Federal Communications Commission.

“A few years ago the state reconfigured,” he said. “They narrow-banded a lot of our frequencies. The FCC was able to get more frequencies in a smaller space, but when they did that, the communication was a lot harder. Your area where you could receive communication was a lot smaller, so what has happened over the last few years, if you were in certain areas of the county, radios don’t work properly. The state is doing a statewide system so everybody can communicate through this system.”

The additional tower will help, Schluttenhofer said.

“It’s going to allow EMS, law enforcement and fire to be able to communicate a lot better than what we can right now,” he said. “It’s going to help with the coverage in Eagle Grove, Woolstock and where Prestage is going.”

Schluttenhofer said the county plans to build another tower near Belmond.

“We are going to build a tower up by the Belmond area to improve coverage in that area too,” he said. “We are going to use our existing tower that we currently own and we are going to tie all three together with the state system to give us a lot better coverage across the county.”