Specifications include, but are not limited to: Lake County is the north-easternmost county in Illinois, located on Lake Michigan between the Chicago and Milwaukee metropolitan areas. Lake County is home to about 736,000 people residing amongst its eighteen townships and more than 50 municipalities. In the interest of protecting the people and resources in the County, Lake County works with a number of partner organizations to prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergency incidents and disasters of all sizes. One significant challenge to this effective collaboration has been the range and array of different voice communication systems and technologies employed by these various partners. The operability and inter-operability of these different systems is vital to safe, efficient, and effective response, and the County and its partners have a strong shared interest in both identifying existing communications resources as well as developing a detailed, tactical-level interoperable communications plan with supporting policies, procedures, user training, and validation exercises. Lake County has been awarded federal Homeland Security funding by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and the Illinois Terrorism Task Force, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Interoperable Emergency Communications Grant Program (IECGP) to improve the current status of interoperable communications in the area. A multi-discipline, multi-jurisdiction stakeholder governance group, known as the Interoperable Communications Council of Lake County (ICCLC), has been convened to provide guidance and oversight of interoperability issues and projects throughout the County.
