911 for Houston dispatch

HOUSTON — As it stands now, the Houston Police Department will be without emergency services dispatch service in two weeks.

That doesn’t mean residents calling for police service won’t get through or that emergencies will not not draw a response. But it has raised concerns among local officials.

The contract the city has with the Mat-Com dispatch center in Wasilla is due to expire at 5 p.m. Sept. 16. It’s not set for renewal and there isn’t a plan to replace it.

Here’s how Houston got here:

Up until this year Houston had been paying Wasilla something on the order of $12,000. When the contract expired this spring that number was recalculated. Wasilla said it would need $54,000.

Houston Mayor Rosemary Burnett said in a press release that the city was told the number rose for two reasons. One was that the Alaska State Troopers, who also contract with Wasilla for dispatching, didn’t think Houston was pulling its weight. The other was that the city of Wasilla wanted the dispatch center to be self-sufficient.

Wasilla Police Chief Mike Hughes and Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright had a slightly different take.

Rupright said the $12,000 figure wasn’t based on any kind of calculation of how much of the Mat-Com service Houston was using. Hughes said that to come up with that $54,000 figure the city used the same formula it uses for the troopers, which takes into account the number of officers in the department as well as the department’s call volume.

To give an idea of how Houston differs from the troopers, Hughes pointed out that the troopers pay a yearly fee in the millions of dollars. So Houston has a relatively low call volume. But that fee was still too much, Houston City Clerk Steve Cunningham said.

“We’re talking one and a half police officers,” he said.

So Hughes recalculated.

“I revisited the numbers and was able to lower that,” Hughes said. “Ultimately they said, ‘Well we can’t pay that either.’”

Cunningham said that the new figure was something on the order of $44,000 — still more than triple what Houston had budgeted.

Hughes said he’s firm in his position of saying Houston has to pay more. If Houston doesn’t, then Wasilla is essentially subsidizing Houston’s police department.

“It would be difficult for me to justify that to the taxpayers here.”

So what’s the solution?

Cunningham said one avenue the city has explored is having troopers take on major emergencies — life-threatening situations and the like — and have the lesser calls forwarded to Houston.

Hughes said the two cities tried to work out that deal but Houston couldn’t come up with a good reliable phone number where dispatchers could send calls.

It’s a complicated proposition. Hughes used the example of a car wreck. Even on relatively minor wrecks, oftentimes multiple people drive by and and call it in on cell phones. Dispatchers wind up fielding multiple calls at once. Sending all of those to one ordinary phone doesn’t cut it.

Another problem Hughes had with that solution is it would put dispatchers in Wasilla in the position of trying to decide which calls were serious and which weren’t. And it’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a call that seemed like no big deal turned out to be something major.

So that didn’t work out. But Hughes said he’s still trying to work with Houston.

“We’ve given them to the 16th with them trying to come up with a solution to handle this on their own,” Hughes said.

Cunningham said there are a few options left.

Houston could try to work out the bugs in the emergency/non-emergency call plan. Or it could try and sign a contract with the Valley’s other dispatch center at the City of Palmer or some other center in the state. Or it could build its own dispatch center.

He said city officials will be approaching Palmer soon.

The man they’re going to want to talk to is Jon Owen, director of public safety for the city. Owen said he will sit down with the city of Houston. But he didn’t express high hopes for how those talks would go.

First, he said, there are technological issues. For one thing, Palmer can’t transmit to Houston using the radio system it has now. Palmer dispatches Houston’s fire department, but does so using a channel it uses for all of the other fire departments.

“That channel is maxed out,” Owen said.

Putting police traffic on it would run the risk of creating a serious safety hazard with responders in the field not being able to get through to dispatch.

If that issue can be overcome, Owen said, then the problem becomes a staffing issue. He said that last year he and the borough’s director of emergency services, Dennis Brodigan, did a cost survey of dispatch centers on the road system.

“The city of Palmer dispatch center is in my opinion the most cost-effective dispatch center on the road system in Alaska,” Owen said. Which is a good thing for Palmer taxpayers but not a good thing for the Houston Police Department. ‘We do not have a lot of excess capacity in our personnel.”

And, just like Wasilla, Palmer does not want to be in the position of subsidizing Houston. If the Palmer center has to add dispatchers to take Houston on, Houston will pay for them.

It’s an issue Owen takes personally. A former cop, he was shot in the line of duty in Dallas and it was a good dispatcher that got him lifesaving medical attention. If squeezing Houston into their dispatch center means lessening in any way the service offered to the other departments, Owen is strongly opposed.

“The dispatch end of things is nowhere to cut corners or public safety will be compromised,” Owen said.

So that leaves the last two options: contract with someone outside the Valley or build a new dispatch center in Houston.

“Should a dispatch center be in Houston’s future, similar sized communities throughout Alaska have called and given their pledge of support for start-up costs and would like to contract for those services,” Burnett wrote in her press release. This option, “will require time to develop the right plan and will need clear support from the community as this is not an easy decision to jump into.”

As for Cunningham, he said he’s not sure it’s the type of thing the city should have to do.

“Why should Houston repeat that process when we have regional people that can do that?”

Rupright, for one, wondered if this might wind up being a mortal threat to the Houston Police Department.

“If you can’t meet your budget maybe you can’t have a police,” he said.

But Cunningham said that Houston residents value the police department.

“One of the reasons that Houston got their police force in the first place was the amount of time it would take troopers to get to the area,” he said. “It’s only been five years ago or six years ago and people still remember it vividly.”

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