Borough seeks dispatch bids

PALMER — While efforts continue to consolidate emergency dispatch services in the Valley, the Mat-Su Borough will solicit bids in the coming months for cities or companies to provide dispatch services here.

Currently the city of Palmer holds the contract to dispatch fire departments and emergency medical services in the borough. The city of Wasilla also has a dispatch center, which handles calls for the Wasilla Police Department and the Alaska State Troopers.

At an assembly meeting Dec. 17 the borough’s director of emergency services, Dennis Brodigan, said the time to re-bid the contract comes up at the start of 2014. He said he hopes to have the proposals returned by mid-March.

Assemblyman Steve Colligan said that in the bidding he intends to find out what the real costs of dispatching are in the borough. He said an auditor’s report on consolidating dispatch seemed to show the borough was paying multiple times more per-call than other services dispatched in the Valley.

Brodigan said that the data in the report was data “in a vacuum.” He said that if the report had factored in things like the borough’s requirement to answer all 911 calls, even those that would be transferred to dispatchers for the Alaska State Troopers or the Wasilla Police Department,

the rates would be

much more similar.

Brodigan also said that the reason borough calls were more expensive is that a lot of the other calls dispatched in Palmer were police calls.

“One of the reasons that the fire EMS calls are a little more expensive per call than a police call is because the level of effort is much higher,” he said. In an emergency medical situation, dispatchers will, “stay on the line with the caller throughout the call until rescuers get on the call.”

Brodgian said that over the course of the current contract, Palmer has only raised its rates 2.5 percent each year to account for increases in cost of living for its employees.

Colligan said he wants to get a clear understanding of all of these costs before the borough awards the bid.

He also said that those numbers are likely going to be a major factor in the efforts to consolidate dispatch.

“I understand the consolidation report said for the same money we can be consolidated,” Colligan said. “What it doesn’t shout and clarify is that we can provide the level of service that we are supposed to, that we aren’t currently, for the same price.”

Brodigan said the last time the contract was bid the city of Wasilla bid actually came in $13,000 cheaper than the city of Palmer, but the borough factored in the level of service that each was proposing and Palmer came out ahead. Wasilla’s getting another shot with this next round of bidding. But then so is every else.

“Both city of Palmer and city of Wasilla are going to have the opportunity to bid on it as well as anyone else in the state,” Brodigan said.

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