Palmer eats dispatch bill

PALMER — A budgeting snafu that left the borough three months behind in payments to the city of Palmer was cleared up Tuesday.    

From the first of the year, the borough, which contracts for emergency dispatching services with Palmer, had not paid its bills. The final bill came to just over $200,000.

“We didn’t get paid all this year until we begged, absolutely begged,” Palmer City Manager Bill Allen said. “We cannot, as I said earlier, carry a receivable of this magnitude.”

Allen actually testified twice on the outstanding bill, once when the assembly was voting to pay it and once when members were discussing a sales tax. He pointed to the bills as a reason he didn’t feel comfortable trusting the borough to collect city taxes.

He asked the assembly to pay the city through June, bringing the bill to about $400,000, a move the assembly agreed to.

Dennis Brodigan, head of emergency services for the borough, said the payment issue came about early last year when an audit of his department claimed the borough was paying just about double what it should for dispatching.

At that time the assembly gave him half the money he needed for the year and put the rest in a reserve account, then told Brodigan to get bids from other municipalities that might provide the service

Money in a reserve account, Brodigan said, can’t be taken out without a vote of the assembly.

The bids for the dispatching came back in October, he said, but the assembly members said they didn’t think the process had been open enough and asked him to do it again, this time soliciting bids statewide, rather than in just Anchorage and the Valley.

That bid was put out on the street last month and is open until 3 p.m. on April 27. Since it’s open to everyone, Brodigan said that in theory — due to advanced technology — the assembly could receive bids from as far away as Nome or Juneau. But he didn’t want to speculate as to who would bid and which bids would be entertained.

At any rate, having been asked to go back out to bid, by the start of the year, he said, he’d run out of money.

“To the city of Palmer’s credit, they continued to serve, there was absolutely no disruption of services in that period.”

Brodigan expects that after bids are received it will be mid-summer before the borough is ready to recommend a bidder to the assembly.

Over in Palmer, Director of Emergency Services Jon Own said there’s no hard feelings over the matter. He said that as of Friday the contract has been paid up through June. The relationship has been good between the two organizations for decades.

“The city has been in a contractual relationship with the borough to provide dispatch for fire and EMS service since at least 1973,” Owen said. “It may go back as far as 1964 when the borough was founded.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.