The debate over a May 2 ballot proposition in Kalamazoo County has intensified in recent weeks. An increased monthly charge on phones would let the county consolidate five different 911 services, and pay for new technology. Proponents say it’s an overdue improvement of local emergency service. But a union that represents local dispatchers disagrees.
Three of Kalamazoo’s five 911 services – the City of Kalamazoo, Kalamazoo County and Kalamazoo Township – already share space on Crosstown Parkway. Despite the proximity, each service functions as its own unit, with its own rules and supervisors. That’s what consolidated dispatch would change. Those three 911 services – as well as the City of Portage and Western Michigan University – would become one service, run by an independent authority.
The May 2 measure does not ask voters to approve consolidation. Rather, it’s a referendum on a phone surcharge. If it passes, people in Kalamazoo will pay $2.30 per month per device that can access 911.
“We feel that the two dollar and thirty cent surcharge is way too much money,” says John Cross of Greater Kalamazoo Fraternal Order of Police, which opposes consolidation.
“We feel that two to three hundred thousand dollars would suffice to fix the problem that they think that they have” at the dispatch center, he adds.
Say you have two cell phones and a landline in your household. You would pay $6.90 per month or about $83 a year toward 911 dispatch.
Supporters of consolidation, including the area’s major law enforcement agencies, say the plan for a unified 911 center makes sense.
Right now, the 911 providers – the four local governments and Western – each pay for their own dispatch costs. That would end under consolidation. The phone surcharge would pay the entire cost of running the new dispatch authority.
“And that will fund the consolidation, all of the upgrades in technology,” says Kalamazoo County Consolidated Dispatch Authority Executive Director Jeff Troyer.
The five 911 providers have already agreed to work toward consolidation; the KCCDA would run the unified service. Troyer says the future of 911 service goes beyond phone calls. He says the state and federal governments want those services to start accepting multimedia.
“Text to 911, pictures, video,” he says.
If that’s the future of 911, “We as Kalamazoo County residents either have to pay to upgrade three to five centers’ systems or we can pay to upgrade one,” he adds.
Troyer says under consolidation the cost of-day to-day operations would in fact go down a more than couple hundred thousand dollars a year.
Then there’s safety.
Tom Edmonds is a former Kalamazoo County sheriff who supports consolidating the dispatch system. Edmonds says, when you have five different 911 centers, sometimes they have to spend valuable time talking to each other to coordinate during an emergency.
“And every layer you have in the system is an opportunity for a mistake. And that’s one of the things that worries me all the time,” he says.
The National Transportation Safety Board has expressed similar concerns. The NTSB recently reviewed the 911 response to an alleged drugged driver reported in Kalamazoo one evening last June. The driver went on to kill five cyclists and injure four others in Cooper Township. The NTSB says the accident might have been prevented had dispatchers communicated with each other more effectively, and the board recommends consolidation as part of the remedy.
Local law enforcement has disputed the report’s conclusions. And Edmonds, the former sheriff, says it’s inappropriate to criticize the dispatchers.
“I think they functioned as best they could and very well,” he says.
But Edmonds says at the same time, “The report does underscore very solidly the need for consolidated dispatch and the potential for improvement that would come from that.”
Also at issue is the way a consolidated system receives calls. In a unified system a call-taker answers the phone. That person enters the information in a computer monitored by a dispatcher, and that person sends out responders. Cross of the Fraternal Order of Police disagrees with that model.
“In my personal experience, if I have something that’s so important for me to be able to call 911, I don’t want a call taker to answer my call. I want a dispatcher, somebody that’s going to actually going to send me help,” Cross says.
But Kalamazoo County Sheriff Rick Fuller says, in his view, talking to a call taker benefits the person who dials 911. He says the call taker can focus on the caller better than a dispatcher can. Fuller says the way things work right now,
“The person that takes the phone call has to multitask to a level where we sometimes tell the person who is very upset, very worried about what’s going on in their world that we have on the phone, ‘please stand by while I do this. Please stand by while I talk to the police officers.’”
Dispatch centers are of course run by people, 53 of them across the five centers in place right now. A unified 911 system wouldn’t drop any jobs. In fact, it would add one position, bringing the total to 54.
But as Troyer with the consolidated dispatch authority acknowledges, the county’s current dispatchers wouldn’t just transfer into those jobs. Instead, they’d have to apply for them.
“We are very hopeful that the majority of the existing dispatch staff will apply for positions with the dispatch authority,” he says.
But Cross is skeptical.
“All the dispatchers would have to reapply for their jobs and we’re concerned about that too. That you’d have a dispatcher with 10, 15 years experience, that, just because maybe the person doing the hiring didn’t like that person, why, they wouldn’t have their job anymore,” he says.
If it passes, the May 2 surcharge will fund consolidated dispatch for 10 years. The surcharge itself would run for five years, after which the authority would have to seek a renewal.
The current 911 providers will save money if consolidation takes effect. The KCCDA says this is how they plan to spend the money:
