City sues over fire dispatch system

The city yesterday filed a $4 million breach-of-contract suitagainst Motorola Inc., charging it failed to provide the Chicago FireDepartment with a computerized system for dispatching fire trucksthat works.

Acting City Corporation Counsel Judson H. Miner said that as faras city lawyers can recall, this was the first time in at least 20years that the city has sued a company or person to whom it hadawarded a contract.

Miner estimated it would cost $3.2 million to correct problemsin Motorola's Computer Aided Dispatch system, a mixture of radios andcomputers, for it to work properly.

The Fire Department put CAD in mothballs last November andreturned to using a simpler, 100-year-old, "hard-wire" dispatchingsystem.

The Cook County Circuit Court suit against Motorola and itsperformance-bond firm, St. Paul (Minn.) Fire and Marine InsuranceCo., said the city entered into a $5.2 million contract with Motorolain 1978.

Since then, Miner said, the city has "continued its good-faithefforts to work with Motorola" to provide a workable system."However, after eight years of negotiations and no completed system,it has become obvious that the only route for the city is to seek ajudicial resolution of the problem."

A Motorola spokesman said, "We have not seen the suit, and so wecan't comment on its contents. Motorola placed the city in defaultof the contract months ago and have been attempting to collect themoney owed to us, which I understand is about $1 million."

The city tested the radio section of CAD for one year,beginning in late 1984, but safety concerns led the Fire Departmentto use the old system as a backup and to complement CAD during peakperiods, he said.

Fire Commissioner Louis T. Galante, who appeared at a City Hallnews conference with Miner, said "critical problems" were discoveredin CAD during testing by Sachs, Freeman & Associates, acomputer-consulting firm.

Galante said the consultants found that when several fire rigswere dispatched, "the engine closest to the fire wouldn't alwaysreceive the message first, thus lengthening the response time."

The message would not consistently and accurately be given toall initial responding units to assure that they all had the properlocation information; the average dispatch time was greater thanunder the old hard-wire system, and equipment to correct problems ofdelayed or inaccurate dispatches was not delivered, Galante said.

Miner said the administration had made no payments to Motorolaon the CAD contract. He said he believed Motorola could continue toservice radios and equipment it sold earlier to Chicago police, theStreets and Sanitation Department and other city departments.