44-4-1602. Findings -- intent. (1) Montana finds that the continued planning and development of a unified statewide public safety communications system must be conducted in an organized, deliberate, and cost-effective manner.

(2) It is the intent of this part to guide future planning for and efforts to sustain the statewide public safety communications system by:

(a) creating and communicating operational recommendations and guidelines applicable to all state agencies and other entities using the statewide public safety communications system to improve overall satisfaction with the communications system, to increase the adoption of recommendations and guidelines, and to set a benchmark for user expectations;

(b) developing a sustainable maintenance plan for the statewide public safety communications system to ensure that the existing statewide public safety communications system remains operational and reliable;

(c) establishing a plan to fund upgrades, modifications, maintenance, or migration of technology within the statewide public safety communications system;

(d) ensuring that public-private partnerships are used to expand, modify, migrate, operate, and maintain the statewide public safety communications system in a cost-effective manner to achieve the objectives and required functionality of the system;

(e) to the greatest extent possible, encouraging the use of nonproprietary, standards-based, and commercially available technology to allow a wide array of system options and cost-effective deployments;

(f) ensuring that the primary purpose of the statewide public safety communications system is to enable participating agencies to fulfill their respective missions, and not to implement a specific technology or standard; and

(g) requiring that future modifications, expansions, or migrations of the statewide public safety communications system are developed in cooperation with federal, state, tribal, and local governments and private industry with a goal to provide seamless access to mission-critical voice, data, or both voice and data communications to the greatest extent possible.