After a deadly flash flood swept through Kerr County in central Texas this summer, rescuers combed dozens of miles along the Guadalupe River, looking for survivors. The grueling job was made more difficult because the radio system they needed to coordinate the response was not up to the task.

Some rescuers got busy signals. Others got garbled messages. At Camp Mystic, the summer camp where 25 children died in the flooding, there was little to no coverage. Temporary radio towers eventually were brought in to extend service into the disaster zone.

It was a frustrating mix of problems, made even more troubling because Kerr County had just spent $7 million to overhaul its radio communication system. But the deficiencies were no accident: The new network installed by Motorola Solutions excluded about a quarter of the county’s sprawling territory from reliable coverage for portable radios, leaving dead zones around Camp Mystic and other areas along the river.

To identify the system’s shortcomings, The New York Times digitized proposed coverage maps for Kerr County, reviewed contracting records and obtained data about the radio network’s performance through public records law. The Times found that a nonprofit public utility had also sought to bid on the project and had proposed more extensive portable radio coverage that would have reached more than 90 percent of the county’s territory, including the Camp Mystic area.

That alternative system proposed by the utility, the Lower Colorado River Authority, would also have offered more capacity. And it could have been cheaper. But Motorola won the contract anyway, aided by a process that was tilted in the company’s favor.

Motorola proposed less coverage than L.C.R.A. in Kerr County

A Times analysis of the two proposals found that Motorola would provide reliable portable radio coverage for about 75 percent of the county, compared to more than 90 percent for L.C.R.A.

Thomas Gilbert, a radio system manager who was brought in by the state to help coordinate communications, said a combination of coverage shortfalls and compatibility problems proved frustrating for responders who were struggling to find victims of the flooding. Some searchers had to hike out of the search areas to communicate when they found themselves upriver with little or no radio coverage.

“That was a huge gap,” Mr. Gilbert said in an interview.

The communications challenges raise questions not just about Kerr County’s new radio system, but also about the broader role played by Motorola Solutions, a company that dominates the emergency communications business in the United States, generating large profits from taxpayer-funded projects.

Like other competitors that have gone up against the radio powerhouse in recent years, the public utility that proposed the alternative radio system complained that the county’s bidding process was not a level playing field. The utility ultimately dropped out, leaving Motorola as the only formal bidder.

It was a familiar scenario for Motorola, which has won a series of high-profile contracts in recent years when there were no other bidders. Local governments lament that along the way, list prices for individual radios have risen, from as much as $8,000 a decade ago to more than $12,000 today.

Motorola has pointed to problems in Texas, saying that while the state has made “great strides” to improve its emergency radio networks, it can be tough for any radio network to operate there without hitches.

“The vast geography can make it difficult to establish and maintain communication systems that provide full coverage and interoperability,” Lauren Kirkland, a Motorola vice president, said at a legislative hearing in Austin last year.

Motorola, which declined to answer questions about the Kerr County contract, has said that the rising prices for its equipment reflect the sophisticated technology and durability of their latest offerings, which look like a cross between traditional police radios, with knobs on top, and modern touch-screen cellphones. Still, the trend of higher prices and few suppliers has posed a nationwide challenge for public safety departments, whose hefty budgets in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks lured private equity and other investors into the supply chain.

The Times reported earlier this year about soaring prices for fire engines, as Wall Street consolidated the industry. Members of Congress are investigating.

When he was called before state lawmakers to discuss the July floods, Sheriff Larry Leitha of Kerr County acknowledged problems with search crews from other jurisdictions being unable to use the county system, creating problems with interoperability. And he said “I still have concerns” about the limited extent of radio coverage in the western part of the county.

County officials have not explained why they did not require broader coverage in that area, including around Camp Mystic, when they were soliciting proposals for the radio system. Despite the shortcomings, they said they were nonetheless happy with its performance.

“The new system worked very, very well,” said Jeffrey Wendling, who led efforts at the sheriff’s department to implement the Motorola system. He said some communications channels were overloaded during the floods, but that it resulted in only “momentary” busy signals for emergency crews.

Motorola offered spotty radio coverage near Camp Mystic

A Times analysis of radio logs released under public records law showed that the system was extensively strained. At one point on July 7, three days after the flood, one responder every 45 seconds was receiving a busy signal when they tried to get a message through. Some users had to wait more than 20 seconds to convey their message to dispatchers.

Some communications breakdowns stemmed from government failures. At a hearing after the flooding, Nim Kidd, Texas’s top emergency management official, said that some San Antonio firefighters who traveled to Kerr County to provide assistance had left their own Motorola radios back home; the radios would have needed reprogramming to work in Kerr County. Instead, he said, they used “cheap Chinese radios” that were provided by an emergency task force, and those radios did not work well. “We can do better than that, and we need to,” Mr. Kidd said.

Dominating the Market, for a Price

Over the last two decades, there has been a nationwide push to install interoperable communications systems, spurred by the inability of emergency workers to talk to one another while responding to the Sept. 11 attacks and after Hurricane Katrina.

Motorola Solutions was perfectly positioned for this transition. In 2011, the company broke away from the Motorola cellphone brand to focus on emergency land mobile radio communications.

The company now has 70 to 80 percent of the market, according to financial analysts, and has expanded its offerings for emergency responders to include body-worn cameras, police drones and 911 call-center software. Motorola Solutions’ stock price has surged in the past five years, outperforming Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

“Growing is not good enough,” Greg Brown, the company’s longtime chief executive, said last year on an earnings call. “You’ve got to grow top line, you’ve got to grow margins, you’ve got to grow operating cash flow and you’ve got to take share.”

In recent years, stock of Motorola Solutions has outperformed other Wall Street tech companies.

The company hired influential lobbyists, including a former Mississippi governor, Haley Barbour, and more recently Reed Clay, a former top aide to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas.

It made headlines for lucrative no-bid contracts in places like North Carolina, Florida, California and Texas. Local leaders there were reluctant to try lesser-known vendors, or sometimes raced to sign deals after Motorola warned that its prices would increase if contracts weren’t locked in quickly.

The F.B.I. backtracked on a $500 million no-bid contract with Motorola in 2014 after rival suppliers sought an open competition. In June 2023, some county supervisors in Kern County, Calif., complained that they had been given little time to read a $170 million Motorola contract that ran to roughly 6,000 pages; one competitor claimed that it violated county procurement policies. This year, Ocala, Fla., signed a $5.95 million Motorola contract even though another company had submitted a bid at about half that price.

And the prices keep going up. Mr. Brown told analysts in 2022 that the company’s backlog of orders was growing even though it had imposed “multiple price increases,” which he said “speaks to the criticality of what we do and the ability for our customers to absorb that.”

Mr. Gilbert said that a six-channel Motorola radio site could be put on the air seven years ago for $300,000, but now costs about $500,000.

Keith Housum of Northcoast Research, a longtime industry analyst, said that governments were wary of trying lesser-known competitors.

“No police chief or fire captain wants to put their officers at risk,” he said.

Even so, Motorola’s leadership in the market puts it in a delicate position.

“They want to slide below the radar screen as much as possible,” Mr. Housum said. Motorola executives, he said, “don’t want to talk about market share because they don’t want a bull’s-eye on their back and people saying they are a monopoly.”

In Kerr County, records show, Motorola representatives promoted their bid by noting that the company had built the emergency radio networks for 48 of the 50 largest municipalities in the United States.

The company’s operating profits soared to a record 24.8 percent of sales last year, having grown steadily from 10.5 percent in 2011.

Walt Magnussen, one of the country’s foremost experts on public safety communications, said Motorola had succeeded because it made a good product. But he noted that emergency responders in Europe are often shocked at the prices for radios in the United States.

In 2023, British regulators found that Motorola, which runs the country’s emergency communications systems, was overcharging Britain by roughly $250 million annually, and said the company was using a “virtually unconstrained monopoly position” to reap “supernormal profits.” The company argued that the government’s “failed procurement process” was to blame. The regulators imposed a price cap.

Nobody has benefited from the company’s expansive growth more than Mr. Brown, who has become a billionaire in nearly 15 years at the helm; Mr. Brown hired Elton John to perform at his wife’s birthday party on Cape Cod last year, an event that was also attended by Tom Brady, the former N.F.L. quarterback.

To Motorola, the federal relief money that gushed during the coronavirus pandemic was a major opportunity. In a May 2021 call with Wall Street analysts, Jack Molloy, the company’s chief operating officer, described it as the best funding environment he had ever seen.

“You give salespeople a path to money, good salespeople, and they go find it,” he said.

Kerr County commissioners accepted $10 million in relief money. Though in past years they had discussed plans to invest in a flood warning system, they decided to instead use much of the relief money to upgrade the county’s radio system.

Motorola submitted a proposal, but it was not the only one on the table. Another came from L.C.R.A, , which already operated a network of radio tower sites in Texas. The two competitors offered plans with varying mixes of infrastructure improvements, leases and service costs. The Times examined the proposals and found that over a 10-year period, the cost of Motorola’s plan was on track to exceed that of the authority’s plan by more than $500,000.

Motorola proposed using four towers to carry radio traffic around the county. The river authority proposed using 10, including some that were already in place for other customers.

The Times digitized the coverage maps provided during the process, and found that Motorola’s proposal, as measured there, would provide reliable portable radio coverage for about three quarters of the county, compared with more than 90 percent for the river authority.

The authority’s proposed coverage could have provided more reliable communications around the community of Hunt and through the county’s river valleys, like that of the South Fork of the Guadalupe River, where Camp Mystic is located.

The river authority’s planned system would sustain up to eight simultaneous conversations. Motorola’s would offer up to three.

Mr. Gilbert, who helped manage radio communications during the flood, said that for the systems that he works on, he generally views six simultaneous talk paths as the minimum needed to avoid overloading during a crisis.

Motorola already had a possible advantage in the bidding process. A week before the company’s presentation to the commissioners in April 2022, the county had brought in Mr. Wendling for advice. Mr. Wendling, the director of special projects for the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, also co-chaired an “interoperable communications” committee set up by the Alamo Area Council of Governments.

Mr. Wendling told the Kerr County commissioners that “all of us in our committee” believed the best option for the county was to use a VHF network — a range of radio frequencies used by Motorola but not by the river authority. The authority, which has a nonvoting representative on the committee, said in a statement last week that it was aware of no such committee discussion, and did not agree that VHF was the best choice for the county.

Mr. Wendling did not disclose during his meeting with the Kerr County commissioners that a senior project manager for Motorola, Robert Adelman, was the committee’s co-chairman.

Mr. Wendling and Motorola said that VHF channels were more effective in the hilly terrain found throughout Kerr County. But experts interviewed by The Times said that many variables — such as the number of towers — affect what type of radio system would perform best in a given area. “There is no general rule of thumb on what is the best way to go,” Mr. Magnussen said.

The county then imposed another contract requirement. It said that bidders would have to guarantee that equipment purchased in future years would not rise in price more than the rate of inflation. The river authority responded that only a manufacturer could make such a guarantee, and it complained that this tilted the bid requirements in Motorola’s favor.

In correspondence with Kerr County, authority officials expressed concern that the county’s radio specifications appeared to “be designed to favor a particular manufacturer.” They said it was “remarkable” that the committee advising the county on the contract would be co-chaired by an employee of one of the bidders, and called the arrangement “a clear conflict of interest.”

In an interview, Mr. Adelman said that the river authority officials were “just being sore losers,” and that Motorola’s success in numerous contracts was based on its offering a “superior product.” He rejected accusations that his role represented a conflict, saying that while he works on public safety technology for Motorola, he was not directly involved with land mobile radio products, and thus did not need to recuse himself.

“I can’t help who I work for,” he said. “I do everything I can to keep a wall up, to ensure that I can say without a doubt that I don’t believe there is a conflict of interest.”

In the end, the river authority offered an alternative proposal that did not fully address all of the county’s requirements, and the county said it could not consider it a viable bid.

As 2022 wound down, the county raced to sign a deal with Motorola.

“Can somebody explain why there’s a rush to get this done before the end of the year?” one commissioner asked during a public meeting on Dec. 27. A Motorola salesman replied that price increases were coming. Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official, said this meant that more than $600,000 was on the line.,“That’s a savings I want to get,” he said. The commissioners immediately approved the deal.

Motorola’s system had been up and running for several months when the July 4 weekend deluge arrived, sending a rush of water down the Guadalupe River in the middle of the night.

As the scope of the disaster became clear, crews from across the region rushed in to help.

Mr. Gilbert arrived two days after the floods. At the emergency operations center, he immediately found crews who were aggravated by persistent radio problems. Kerr County’s system was so new that other agencies had not yet entered the county’s network protocols into their own radios. Mr. Gilbert said he set up an assembly line for programmers to update the radios of workers arriving from other jurisdictions.

Then, as Mr. Gilbert began driving along the river to some of the areas of heaviest flooding, he found different problems. In upriver regions, responders from outside the county who came in with radios that were programmed to work on the river authority’s existing networks could communicate, but others, including those trained to use Kerr County’s new Motorola system, could not.

Mr. Gilbert brought in two mobile towers to help provide service in the upriver areas where communications were most difficult. One was placed in Hunt, where the river authority had planned to build a tower but Motorola had not. The other was placed on a hill at Camp Mystic. Coverage improved immediately.

“It was night and day,” Mr. Gilbert said, adding that the two mobile towers handled some 8,000 radio calls over the following days.

The river authority declined to comment for this article on its contract proposal, beyond its public communications with the county. It is not clear whether the authority’s proposed network, with more towers, would have solved all the problems that the county experienced during the floods.

The temporary radio towers erected during the flood have since been removed. Mr. Wendling acknowledged that a new permanent tower might be needed to improve coverage. “There’s all kinds of things for everybody to learn,” he said.