Non-Environmental Cost-Benefit News

Combining the city and county emergency 911 dispatches will take away backup systems, increase response times, and realize little savings city officials were told Monday evening, April 11. The comments came at a public meeting of the City Council addressing the consolidation.

About two dozen people turned out. Of those, about half were police or dispatchers.

The council took no action, although council action on the matter is likely in May.

Under consideration is consolidating the city and county emergency 911 dispatch systems into one dispatch at the sheriff’s office at the new Justice Center. City officials believe the consolidation will save tax dollars, particularly because the city dispatch system will soon need expensive hardware upgrades and a fuller staff.

Monday’s meeting, which focused on public comments, followed a meeting on Thursday of the city Emergency Communications Services ad hoc Committee in the basement of the library. A report outlining the consolidation was presented at both meetings.

Seven people addressed the council on Monday.

Mary Hoeft, who has a daughter who works as a police officer in Madison, said she rode along with her daughter and saw confusion by dispatchers who did not understand the nuances of a situation.

“It’s comforting to know the dispatcher taking the call is close, very close,” she said.

She said that while the city believes the consolidation could save $165,000 per year, “That savings could come at the expense of a life.

“They’ve been working in Rice Lake for so long they know the people, the streets, every inch of it,” she said of Rice Lake’s dispatchers.

Policeman Gary Amundson said Rice Lake is a city of 8,000 serving 80,000. He said the actual annual savings would be more like $50,000-$60,000, rather than the $165,000 suggested by the city. He said that’s about $10-$12 per year for the average taxpayer.

“If we eliminate our dispatch there’s going to be a loss of services, a loss of response time,” he said.

“You have to ask yourself is it worth $10 or $12 on your taxes next year? I don’t think so,” he said.

Margaret Marsh said the matter should be put to a countywide referendum.

City dispatcher Dorothy Rudoll said Barron County is now the number one county in the state for meth cases. She said city police have found guns and meth on routine traffic stops. She said Barron County dispatchers had trouble last week with multiple dispatches involving a man caught in a silo.

She said she was concerned with what would happen if Barron County’s dispatch system went down because of weather or other reasons. Currently Rice Lake and Barron County dispatches are the backups for each other. Barron and Polk counties are also backups for each other.

“We need the redundancy of Rice Lake and Barron being backups for each other,” she said.

Rudoll, too, suggested a referendum.

Peggy Nitz was also concerned with backup systems, and asked if Barron County would charge additional taxes to offset the increased expense.

Backup systems also concerned city dispatcher Cathy Robinson. “If Barron County is down, how is Polk going to get the information to us?” she asked.

Robinson also questioned data about how many walk-ins there were at the police department. She said if people there were busy, they did not have time to mark the walk-in tally sheet.

“This is a bad idea. It’s not keeping the populace safe. The populace is here in this city,” she said.

Policeman Brian Swantz said he also worked in Menomonie where the city and county dispatches were combined. He said that worked because Menomonie was the largest city in the county, and the two facilities were in the same building.

“If it isn’t broken, why fix it?” asked Bob Olson, who has worked for the Sheriff’s Department.

Olson said many officers began as dispatchers, and that the knowledge obtained as a dispatcher “made them much, much better on the street.”

“If this doesn’t work, what will be involved to reopen our dispatch center?” asked Councilman Bob Enderle.

Councilman Dick Pajula, chairman of the communications committee, said the success of the changeover will depend on the implementation plan.

Once the project is started, he said, “It’s got to happen. It’s got to be done right.”

“The way we’ve been running our operation can’t sustain much longer,” said police chief John Sommerfeld.

In response to concerns about backup systems, Barron County Sheriff Tom Ritchie said there were four or five areas that can be dispatched from, and that a majority of counties do not have backups. He said dispatch can be done out of squad cars if necessary, or from the emergency operations center. He said a new command post now being developed will have emergency dispatch capability.

Addressing county personnel changes necessary to combine the dispatches, he said, “We have not done an official staffing analysis.”

Ritchie said the county now has more than 20 911 calls per day, including cell phone calls. The city has about seven calls per day.

Swantz asked if the sheriff would dedicate a dispatcher or a frequency to Rice Lake. Ritchie responded that the frequency question hasn’t been addressed, but that dedicating a dispatcher was unlikely.

“We would want all dispatchers dispatching all units,” he said.

Ritchie said, too, that he didn’t think Rice Lake would be charged extra for coverage because the county does not charge other municipalities for 911 dispatch.

“The city is already paying for 20% of the Sheriff’s Department as it is,” said Mayor Larry Jarvela.

Report addresses concerns

The city communications committee approved several recommendations in a consolidation report on a 5-0 vote on Thursday. The matter is likely to come before the council for action on May 24.

At Thursday’s meeting, Ritchie said an early plan to implement a combined city-county dispatch by August wasn’t feasible, but that the county will work with the city to consolidate the two dispatches.

Recommendations approved by the communications committee on Thursday were to:

• Integrate the city and county dispatch contingent on an implementation plan.
• Establish 12-hour per day, 6- day per week coverage for “safety support” in the city, with a transition period of up to 90 days with round-the-clock coverage.
• Cooperate with the county to establish a 911 advisory committee, which includes representation from other cities and villages, to establish joint policies and procedures.
• Equip squad cars with mobile computers with a data bank centralized at the county.

The vote to approve the recommendations came after a presentation of a report, a discussion, and comments from Robinson and Rudoll.

At that meeting, Ritchie said that the projected consolidation completion date of August wasn’t realistic because the county is working on revising its data system and will soon work on an enhanced 911 cell system. Under that system, the location of incoming cell calls will be automatically available to dispatchers.

The city had originally considered combining the dispatches earlier this year, but at a previous committee meeting last fall, it became obvious that too many details remained to be resolved before consolidation could be done.

On the communications committee are Pajula, Allan Cronk, Dane Deutsch, Ann Gleichert, Dennis Holtegaard, Howard Johnson and Councilman Gary Horvat. Gleichert and Johnson were not at Thursday’s meeting.

The report, compiled by Pajula, Sommerfeld and fire chief Jim Resac, addressed several areas of concern. The authors also contacted or visited several communities that had combination dispatches.

The report said a report from the state Legislative Audit Bureau states that the best practices for dispatch centers include staffs that do not have other duties, direct dispatch, an enhanced 911 system, distinct boundaries and an oversight board.

Communities studied in the report included Marinette, which recently merged its dispatch with Marinette County. Pajula said those communities initially considered a merger not to be viable, but a new law enforcement center was built enabling the merger. He said that system includes city support staff coverage from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. and a red emergency telephone in the police station lobby, and video link to the dispatch is now being considered.

Other communities in the study were Rock County in the southeastern part of the state, Monroe County and Walworth County. Pajula said Walworth County was not successful in a merger.

Antiquated system

At Thursday’s committee meeting, city administrator Curt Snyder said if the city is to maintain a viable city dispatch it will need a system for locating cell phone calls. That technology, he said, costs about $250,000. The county dispatch is expected to receive the only grant available in Barron County to build a cell phone locator system, meaning no grant will be available for Rice Lake.

Sommerfeld, too, said that the dispatch console at the police department is obsolete. Costs of upgrading the dispatch hardware to acceptable levels over the next 5 years are expected to be about $330,000.

Snyder said city costs of combing the two dispatches are estimated at $151,000. That cost includes the installation of computers in police cars, expected to cost about $10,000 each.

Pajula said the city now needs 4.5 people to fully staff the dispatch here. “We end up taking police officers off the street to staff dispatch. In my mind, that’s the wrong model,” he said.

The police dispatch is currently staffed by two full-time dispatchers, with police officers filling in when those dispatchers aren’t available.

The cost-benefit part of the report noted that there would be no savings in the first year because of transition costs, such as putting mobile computers in cars. There would be a savings of about $165,000 per year in following years at the present staffing level. That saving would be more if the dispatch was fully staffed, rather than having its current short staff.

Ritchie said the matter hasn’t been discussed at the county level. “It’s a city issue that we’re willing to work with the city on. If they decide to move forward, we’ll absolutely do whatever we can to make it happen,” he said.-04/13/05

by Gene Prigge
Rice Lake Online www.ricelakeonline.com
28 South Main Street - Rice Lake, WI 54868 - (715) 234-2121 -
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