By TJ Kennedy, FirstNet Acting General Manager

Yesterday, FirstNet held its third quarterly webinar for all 56 state Single Points of Contacts (SPOC). The discussion provided opportunities for FirstNet leadership and the SPOCs to exchange information on a host of developments – such as the status of the states’ checklists and the upcoming state consultation meetings, to our strategy for developing the nationwide public safety broadband network. We covered a lot of ground during the webinar and look forward to hosting them on a quarterly basis, in addition to our monthly calls with the SPOCs that are held by FirstNet region.

We started the webinar by introducing Victoria Garcia, who is the Statewide Interoperability Coordinator (SWIC) for Hawaii. Victoria provided a detailed recap of the workshop held last week with FirstNet, the DHS Office of Emergency Communications, and representatives from the island states and territories. The FirstNet team and I were pleased to receive positive feedback on the workshop and will look to incorporate the recommendations and observations from Victoria and all of the attendees into future discussions with the states and territories. To read more about the workshop, please see Board member Jeff Johnson’s blog entry at http://www.firstnet.gov/newsroom/blog/bodies-waterbodies-land-npsbn-chal....

We then moved into the FirstNet portion of the webinar during which I provided updates on recent organizational developments at FirstNet. I introduced several new members of the FirstNet team who will be working directly with the states and territories on outreach, planning, and consultation, including: Brian Hobson (state plans), Doug Harder (state plans), Carl Rebstock (tribal outreach), Jeremy Zollo (state and local outreach), and Claudia Wayne, who has joined us on a detail assignment to support the state consultation team. Like so many members of the FirstNet staff, they come to us with several years of experience working with the state, local, and tribal communities on public safety communications issues. They will be valuable resources for both FirstNet and the states as we move forward on the consultation process.

Next, I spent some time discussing our approach to developing an open, transparent, and competitive process for the comprehensive network RFP and the network equipment and services RFP. FirstNet has set up an internal team to focus exclusively on the RFP process and to coordinate with the outreach and consultation teams to ensure we are incorporating public safety’s insights in the process. A key goal of the RFP process is to foster robust competition within the vendor community, which in turn will help FirstNet deploy a sustainable network model that will generate the best value for public safety and keep user fees low.

Following our discussion about the RFP process, Dave Buchanan, FirstNet Director of State Consultation, delivered an update on state consultations. Dave highlighted key next steps in the process, from the initial consultation meetings to the preliminary design reviews. Dave reported significant progress on the pre-consultation process: to date, 37 states and territories have either scheduled or completed pre-consultation conference calls with FirstNet, and 14 had submitted their checklists.

In addition, FirstNet will host the first initial consultation pilot meeting on July 29 with the state of Maryland. As Dave said during the webinar, that meeting will be a valuable learning experience for FirstNet. We intend to improve our understanding about Maryland’s progress, challenges, and needs for the network, as well as gather lessons learned and best practices to help us develop the most effective and efficient consultation meeting in each state and territory.

Amanda Hilliard, Director of Outreach, discussed recent updates to the outreach toolkit. FirstNet continues to refine and develop tools and resources to assist SPOCs with their outreach and awareness efforts, including fact sheets, videos, and presentations. They have been posted on our web site at: http://firstnet.gov/resources.

I was very pleased to see nearly 100 participants representing the states and territories participate in yesterday’s SPOC webinar. We look forward to hosting the next SPOC Webinar in October.

Thanks,
TJ