In the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania in September 2014, state police search for Eric Frein, a suspected cop killer. But their radios aren’t working. They can’t talk to each other. That’s bad, and it got worse.

“We dispatched hundreds of troopers and they’re looking in the woods for Frein,” Maj. Diane Stackhouse testified at a recent hearing in the state Senate. “Well, the Open Sky portable radios would blink and beep. This is a software problem and it created an officer safety issue. It’s very disturbing to me that that was happening and they can’t disable it, and it’s been a problem since the beginning.”

The beginning was Act 148 of 1996. Then-Governor Tom Ridge approved $179 million for a statewide radio system that would let state police, state agencies and local first responders communicate with one another in the event of an emergency.

Over more than 20 years, governors and lawmakers of both parties threw good money after bad toward MA/COM and then Harris Corporation. Open Sky, as it’s called, became open wallet. In those two decades, the cost has swelled to an estimated $800 million taxpayer dollars. And it still doesn’t work properly.

“The Open Sky system remains unreliable and unpredictable,” Stackhouse told ABC27 following her Senate appearance.

Questions have certainly been raised through the years. So have voices.

“I think the commonwealth got screwed,” Sen. Scott Wagner (R-York) said during Senate Appropriations hearings in years past.

“This company (Harris) is really bad to think they can get away with that,” Rep. Stan Saylor (R-York), the Appropriations Committee chairman, said during this year’s budget hearing.
　
But like those faulty radios that are prone to cutting out, the message never got properly delivered to powerbrokers in Harrisburg. Lawmakers increasingly got angry. Troopers increasingly got frustrated. Harris increasingly got paid.

“Shame on elected officials who allowed this to happen,” said Sen. Scott Martin (R-Lancaster). “We need to know who exactly these people were. Who signed off? Who said here’s the keys to the car, the car works fine, when in reality, it was a lemon.”

Martin is the latest to loudly call for an investigation into the statewide radio project which many call a boondoggle. Whispers in Harrisburg suggest a probe by the attorney general’s office is underway, but that office will neither confirm nor deny its existence.

Auditor General Eugene DePasquale (D) announced Thursday that he will perform an audit of the past four years of the contract. Critics wonder what took DePasquale so long to get under the project’s financial hood and why haven’t previous attorneys general taken a look when there was so much public and private criticism by troopers on the ground.

Martin suspects an investigation will unveil the usual Capitol concoction of powerful people with powerful connections that kept the plug from being pulled on a flawed project.

“There were lobbyists coming out of the woodwork saying we can keep making this work. Keep spending your money here. Don’t abandon us,” Martin said.

The tipping point was the Frein manhunt and the radios that simultaneously didn’t work or dangerously screeched and squawked at inopportune moments. Motorola stepped in and provided radios that did work and has since taken over the radio project.

The good news, if there is any, is that it appears a statewide radio system will be completed.

“I am going to deliver a reliable radio system for the troopers and the other 21 state agency employees,” Stackhouse said with confidence.

The bad news? It’ll cost more than a billion dollars by the time it’s done.

“Somebody should go to prison for all the money that was spent on this,” Wagner said.