The Crawford County Emergency Management team celebrated the end of 2025 with the official completion of the countywide emergency communications system project that was years in the making. Emergency Management Coordinator Zach Rasmussen says while the project got underway in 2015, planning for the new system started long before that.
The radio system consultant, Raycom, was hired in 2015 to perform a radio needs study to determine what updates were going to be needed. The Crawford County Board of Supervisors approved of the recommendations in 2018 and Rasmussen says the construction of the new system began in 2019 with radio equipment upgrades at the Crawford County Communications Center, the existing tower sites, and the installation of four new towers.
Talk channels were placed into service in the summer of 2025, with paging operations officially transitioned at the end of the project. Rasmussen says he already received positive feedback from many fire, EMS, and law enforcement department members on the quality of the communications and its extended reach.
The project cost was roughly $1.6 million and was paid over the course of multiple fiscal years, to keep the impact on Crawford County residents’ taxes minimal. Rasmussen says this transition was a huge undertaking but because of resilience with multiple departments, it became a reality.
Rasmussen says the Crawford County Emergency Management team will always keep its focus on keeping Crawford County residents and visitors protected and will continue to invest to be able to do that job accordingly.
