Elected through Terror

Untitled Part 37

We compromised by forming a separate entity with a separate Board of Directors comprised of a City Representative, a County Government Representative, a Representative of the Rural fire protection agency which covered the area in the two phone exchanges for The Dalles and one Representative who would represent all the other entities in the county and selected by them.

Each entity had an equal vote – another sticking point with the City who felt they should have more weight to their vote. The City Manager smoothed that over.

As I mentioned earlier, the money received from the state 9-1-1 plans was insufficient to operate a center – on any level – it had to be propped up with other funds. The funding was an additional burden for the plan.

When I first talked with the volunteer organizations most of them thought they would be getting pagers and new radios from the funding.

I had to convince them that it was not going to happen. There just wasn't enough money to purchase these items and build and operate the center. It took a while, but we finally got them to understand it wasn't feasible.

Where the center was going to go was also a big issue. The City had a Center, inside the City's Fire Department's hall.

That was not an acceptable location for the volunteers, they were afraid of too much City influence being placed on the center if it remained there. We located an alternate site in the Phone Company's building. They had a large room that was perfect for the center.

We had just three more obstacles to overcome.

How were the calls to the volunteer agencies to be handled?

We remedied that by leaving the telephone trees for each agency in place. There was some liability in doing this. All 9-1-1 calls must be responded to, some were concerned (Mostly The City) that if we left those phone trees in place a call might be dropped.

A phone tree system is basically one number to be called for services. That number is forwarded to a volunteer, the person that answers that phone then calls two more volunteers, who call two more volunteers, etc. and the emergency is being responded to by the agency.

It works in a lot of areas, it had been working for the volunteers for as long as anyone could remember and they weren't going to stop responding now.

It took a while – and the City Manager was a great help in this – to convince The City that the volunteers were serious about providing services in their area – and often assisting others in nearby areas. They would not drop calls.

Leaving the phone trees in place enabled the 9-1-1 dispatcher to call the tree, patch the caller to the agency and then let that agency handle the call as they always had.

It gave the added comfort to the volunteers that they still controlled their responses and since much of a rural area life is geography spent more on a person's residence than the actual address (this is Joe I need an ambulance up here) they could talk to the caller and get the necessary information.

The second of the three road blocks was funding.

The City used their center to receive all calls for the fire and ambulances as well as the police department. They would then dispatch whichever agency was needed and maintain radio contact with them.

They also handled all other phone calls for service and radio calls from the three departments.

There were some outspoken members of The City council that felt the volunteer agencies should also pay into the center.

The City Manager, other council members and I pointed out that the volunteers had NO funding sources. They did not receive any taxes. They had bake sales and fund raisers just to get equipment and gas for their vehicles.

Basically we said leave them alone – and that thought prevailed.

There was discussion of making the 9-1-1 center a separate taxing entity, separate from the rest of the governmental entities, but that didn't get any momentum.

As Sheriff, I wanted the same dispatching services for my Office that the City's Police Dept. received. We had been depending on our clerical personnel to dispatch our units for years.

The problem with that was not only were they trying to listen for deputies (who may need immediate assistance), responding to their requests, but they also had paperwork AND serve as receptionists for our Office AND answer to phones from citizens calling in AND they had to attend to female inmates AND watch the monitors when the CO's were in the jail area with inmates.

When they were away from the radio a CO had to operate the radio – not a good use of manpower. Deputies were at risk as well as COs and the inmates.

The Wasco Rural Fire Department also wanted to continue having their units dispatched by the center.

In an attempt to allocate costs and shares of the operation, we calculated, as close as possible, the number of calls by each agency. As I recall the following was decided:

As we reviewed the calls each agency had and how they were dispatched it was found that law enforcement comprised about 90% of the calls. When we factored in the calls for city service and those for the Sheriff's Office we determined that the city had/would have more calls into the dispatch center.

We divided that - so the City would pay 50% for law enforcement and the County 40% for law enforcement related calls. The City and Wasco Rural would pay an equal amount, 5%, for the fire and ambulance costs.

All entities paying into the system agreed to the formula with a review to be done each year.

The Director of the Center would submit a budget to the 9-1-1 Board and after review and making any changes they would approve the budget and pass it along to the three paying entities.

The City, the county, for the Sheriff's Office, and Wasco Rural would then take this budget, to their budget committees to get it approved.

This was different from some other centers around the state where the actual calls were counted as they came in and the individual agency was then billed for each call. We preferred our method. There was far less paperwork and the formula has pretty well stood up over the years.

We now had only one more roadblock – and it was going to be the most difficult of all.