Borough considering changes to dispatch services

WASILLA — Local city and borough officials say changes to the way 911 calls are handled in the borough could drive up costs for the service, but may be necessary to improve service.

All 911 calls in the borough currently go through the 12-person Palmer dispatch center, which handles about 27,000 calls per year. Calls requiring law enforcement services other than those at the Palmer Police Department then get transferred to the Mat-Com Dispatch center in Wasilla, which dispatches Alaska State Troopers and Wasilla Police. The contract is worth about $900,000 per year.

Estimates provided in a borough research paper estimate the future dispatch contract could increase to $1.2 million.

The current contract is almost a decade old, and efforts to update it have been contentious. For example, in March 2014, borough officials sent out a new request for proposal that opened the bidding process to providers statewide, and awarded the contract to the City of Palmer, the previous contract holder. Wasilla officials contested the award over concerns about the process.

Mayor Bert Cottle, then a deputy administrator under mayor Verne Rupright, said the concern was about the process.

“We didn’t believe [borough officials] followed the guidelines they set out,” he said.

Instead of resolving the conflict, borough officials essentially rolled the contract over again. Palmer retained the dispatch contract under the 2006 terms, and avoided a pension payment and budget increase despite a staffing reduction (eliminating dispatchers as a category of borough employee would automatically make the city liable for $2.7 million in pension obligations over 20 years, officials said in 2013).

Palmer Mayor Delena Johnson said updating the current contract was unnecessary.

“We have a lot of trained dispatchers in place,” she said. “It’s a well-run, efficient system. There’s no reason to change it.”

The current contract only covers manpower. Changes outlined in a borough white paper include the cost of adding equipment historically provided and maintained by the borough, said borough information technology director Eric Wyatt. That’s because borough officials are also required to provide hardware support, and the borough does not provide 24-hour support, according to the white paper.

The proposal lists four cons and one pro to the possibility of adding software. The pro is that borough information technology staff won’t be responsible for repairing the software. The four cons: it will cost too much for the borough, won’t provide a reduction in manpower, the borough will still need to retain records of dispatch calls, and that a new RFP could potentially end up moving the 911 system out of the borough altogether.

Borough official have also started to push for consolidated dispatch operations over concerns that the transfer system can create problems, with at least some calls getting dropped or disconnected in the process, and callers having to repeatedly describe the same situation to dispatchers. For example, if law enforcement officers attached to the Wasilla dispatch discover that additional services are needed, they have to pass the call back to the Palmer dispatch to receive them.

Transfers have also proven dangerous for first responders. For example, during a 2013 public meeting on the subject, a Wasilla-based dispatcher described a situation where she sent an Alaska State Trooper to a house where an armed man was waiting to ambush law enforcement, at least in part because she wasn’t able to hear the first portion of the call, which was answered in Palmer.

In the past, Alaska State Troopers have insisted on separate dispatch services, foiling attempts to blend the services together. Officials with the troopers did not respond with a comment in time for this story.

Dispatchers at a relatively quiet Palmer Dispatch center said Tuesday they were waiting to see how consolidation would play out, though the need for effective service is undeniable. Dispatchers there have delivered babies and saved lives over the phone, and said location wouldn’t affect how they performed their jobs. They also said they face less-than-uniform cell phone service and field calls from remote locations, which can affect service.

“We’re the Valley’s number-one rated radio station,” quipped dispatcher Myra Lanthier.

For the time being, building a single borough dispatch center likely isn’t in the cards, Johnson said. Officials have discussed procedures to get the two dispatch centers to communicate more effectively, and software to allow smoother call transfers.

“We talked about a consolidation in place,” she said. “As far as building a whole new dispatch center, it sounds like that’s something the borough’s trying to get away from.”

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.