Valley looks to consolidate dispatch centers

PALMER — To demonstrate why the Valley should have one emergency dispatch center instead of two, Rebecca Lopez told a story about a night when she was dispatching for the city of Wasilla.

“I almost lost an officer one night and, troopers, I hope you’re listening because it was your guy,” she said.

She went on to describe a bizarre incident in which the caller claimed to have accidentally reached 911 in an attempt to call a department store late at night. She sent an officer to make sure everything was OK, but had she handled the full call, start to finish, she would have easily been able to tell something was wrong and warned her officer to be careful.

But since calls are answered in Palmer and transferred to Wasilla when Alaska State Troopers are the appropriate agency, she didn’t hear the whole call. Palmer got the first portion, and she missed the signs something was amiss, she said.

As it turned out, the call was a ruse and an armed man was waiting for troopers.

“My officer was almost shot as he entered that house,” Lopez said.

Lopez spoke at the end of a Thursday meeting between the city councils for Palmer, Wasilla and Houston and the Mat-Su Borough Assembly. The meeting was called to talk about consolidating dispatch.

Dave Magnenat, a consultant with the Seattle firm ADCOMM that was contracted to study consolidation, said all 911 calls are now answered in Palmer. AST and Wasilla Police Department calls are transferred to Wasilla, which holds the contract to dispatch for troopers.

Magnenat said that can cause all kinds of delays and problems. An example he used was a call in Talkeetna that needed troopers and an ambulance. Ambulances are dispatched out of Palmer.

An ambulance waiting for troopers to arrive and secure a scene will call Palmer dispatch and ask when troopers are due to arrive. Palmer will call Wasilla. Wasilla’s call-taker will ask the dispatcher working with the trooper. The dispatcher will radio the responding trooper and then the answer is filtered back down that chain to the ambulance.

“That’s eight steps, five different people involved in this conversation and three different types of communication,” Magnenat said.

With that kind of complicated communication, said another ADCOMM consultant, Joe Blaschka, there is a much greater than necessary chance for errors and also for more liability if someone decides to file a lawsuit.

Those are some reasons to consolidate, they said, but is money among them?

Probably not, Blaschka said.

“In most cases, unless you’re a very small agency and you’re consolidating with a very large agency, you’re not going to save much money,” he said.

One wrinkle to this, though, is the Alaska State Troopers. AST contracts account for quite a bit of the money available to provide dispatching service. And, as of now at least, it looks like troopers won’t participate.

Major Matt Leveque, deputy director of the Alaska State Troopers, said troopers participated in the consolidation survey mostly out of courtesy.

“It would be rude and premature of us to say, ‘nah, we don’t want none of that,’” he said.

But his opening statement when this all began, Leveque said, was that a consolidated center was not AST’s preferred solution. Troopers, he said, are working on a plan to have regional dispatch centers around the state with which partner agencies could contract.

He said nationwide, state agencies are very reluctant to contract with local centers like the one proposed for the Valley. Troopers feel the same way. Asked about a timeline for rolling out a new trooper dispatch plan, he said there isn’t one.

“You’re saying, ‘you’re crazy, you don’t want this, but you don’t have an alternative,’” Leveque told the crowd. “And yes, that’s correct.”

As for the assembled politicians, not one said consolidation is a bad idea or a non-starter.

“Public safety, health and welfare is why we have government,” Palmer Mayor DeLena Johnson said.

“We have a responsibility around this table as leaders to address this problem,” added Mat-Su Borough Assemblyman Steve Colligan.

And, he pointed out, it needs to be a joint effort.

“All of us would love to be in control of all of this, but every one of us in our budgets doesn’t have enough to pay for all of this,” he said.

“I think consolidation, with or without the state troopers, should move forward,” Houston Deputy Mayor Jim Johansen said.

“We’re growing and growing quick, and if we don’t get our act together now we’re going to be extremely behind the power curve,” Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright said.

Assemblyman Jim Colver said that he came to the meeting thinking dispatch consolidation wasn’t a great idea; it wasn’t going to save any money and the process seems to be working now. But Lopez changed his mind, he said.

“She pointed out just how dysfunctional our system is,” he said.

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