Houston has Guardian

HOUSTON — An 11th-hour decision means the Valley’s smallest police department will continue to field and respond to calls for service.

“We have a new contract,” Houston City Clerk Steve Cunningham said Friday. “We ended up going with Guardian Security.”

Houston Mayor Rosemary Burnett was also pleased with the arrangement and that Guardian could step in quickly enough that Houston wouldn’t have any disruption in dispatch services.

“Everything is satisfactory to the borough. Palmer is doing our dispatching to Guardian,” she said.

City officials were able to tour Guardian’s facility and came away impressed, she said. Still, a decision had to be made quickly. The city was going to lose its dispatch service at the end of business Thursday. As of late last week, it still hadn’t made a decision.

Cunningham said Guardian was able to take on the dispatch services for nearly the price the city had budgeted. The contract will cost Houston $12,000 per year; Houston had $12,800 or so set aside.

The whole saga began last month when the Wasilla Police Department, which had until this past week dispatched for Houston Police out of the Mat-Com dispatch center, informed Houston its rates would be going up. The new price was $44,000, more than triple the old one.

Wasilla said it was really a matter of basic fairness. Mat-Com was charging Houston a rate that wasn’t based on how much service the city actually needed. The new price was based on the same formula used to charge the Alaska State Troopers, an agency that also dispatches through Mat-Com.

Houston said its budget simply couldn’t absorb a hit like that. The city also objected to the suddenness of the hike. Cunningham said the city would have appreciated more than a month’s warning.

Wasilla Police Chief Mike Hughes, who oversees Mat-Com, said Houston’s call volume — averaging 1.3 calls per day — wasn’t the only factor taken into account. It isn’t even the part of the service that takes up the lion’s share of a dispatcher’s time.

A department may only have 1.3 people call each day, but dispatchers are on the radio with an officer almost constantly over the course of a shift as the officer runs traffic stops and calls in license plate numbers for dispatchers to look up. The $44,000 figure included fielding phone calls, but also radio traffic and the department’s administrative lines.

When Houston balked at the $44,000 figure, Hughes said he offered to take all of the department’s 911 calls for free, if Houston could give him a reliable phone number to which he could forward calls, which someone would answer 24 hours a day. Houston couldn’t do that.

Cunningham said he thinks the Guardian contract vindicates the city in its argument that Mat-Com’s price was unfair because Guardian agreed to accept Houston’s budgeted amount.

“To have someone come in and knowing that the numbers were out there still come in less than what we were paying last year is wonderful,” Cunningham said.

And the city will be getting top-notch service, he said. The only thing Guardian lacks is TDD/TTY service.

Guardian is based in Anchorage and monitors building security systems and provides private security guards. Lately, the company has been moving into ambulance service.

Cunningham said the dispatch problem had lately increased the temperature of city debates. There was finger-pointing and questions about whether the city should even continue providing police protection.

“It kind of put the whole city in turmoil, and again, we’ve had our share of turmoil,” he said.

It also strained relationships between Palmer, Houston, Wasilla and the Mat-Su Borough.

“In times of crisis, people tend to pull together,” Cunningham said, adding that didn’t happen in this case. “It was very divisive.”

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