An investigation into Warren County dispatchers allegedly sleeping on job is yielding some eye-opening results.

Warren County Commissioner Dave Young said Thursday, Oct. 15, that security cameras will be installed in the communications center to monitor dispatchers actions.

“That way if people have a little bit of a problem, we’ll know it,” he said.

The investigation into the dispatchers’ actions began in April and includes one dispatcher, Ron Kronenberger, rumored to have been asleep prior to answering a 911 call from Ryan Widmer, who reported his wife’s drowning.

The report, released Wednesday, Oct. 14, by the county, details what happened the night of Aug. 11, 2008, when Widmer reached Kronenberger.

Young said, as part of the investigation, a supervisor at the dispatch center said “people pretty much sleep all the time”

“He’s got three people who sleep quite a bit and don’t know what do about it,” Young said.

Young said the report is “very distressing” regardless of who’s part of the investigation.

“Part one is what in the world is going on on a regular basis in there?” he said. “ Number two, why in the word did it take so long for this to come to our attention?”

He said Kronenberger’s alleged actions were first brought to light during an April training session but not investigated until August.

Young questions why the investigation into the disciplinary problems was initiated with the Kronenberger allegation tacked on almost as an afterthought.

“It happened to relate to arguably the most important 911 call we’ve ever gotten and no one seemed (to think) it was important enough to bring to their boss’ attention,” Young said. “Did people not think this was important? A murder trial had just ended two weeks before and now people are talking about the circumstances surrounding that call?”

He said an outside investigator is being brought in to examine dispatch operations “from top to bottom.”

“We’re going to flip over all the rocks,” Young said.

According to the report, Kronenberger is a habitual sleeper on duty. Emergency Services Director Frank Young, in the same report, apparently told Kronenberger he handled the call poorly and the dispatcher apologized.

He said the dispatcher who first mentioned the alleged incident “was not even on duty at the time.”

“I guess it’s rumors that were out there,” Frank Young said.

No action has been taken against Kronenberger, who started at the position in 2001 and has no prior reprimands, Frank Young said.

“In this particular case, we had discussed bringing him into a hearing but what we have decided to do, at least at this point and time, was to work up a work plan for the shift and bring things back into proper context,” he said.

Dave Young said Paul Kindell, the director of county’s telecommunications department, called him just before noon Thursday, Oct. 15, to say he investigated the call records from the night Widmer called and discovered that Kronenberger was on a calls four minutes and three minutes before Widmer dialed 911.

“That pretty much proves he (Kronenberger) wasn’t sleeping before the call,” Dave Young said. “I don’t know what he was doing before that but four minutes before the Widmer call, he was not asleep.”

Young said commissioners do not want to be in the middle of a murder trial

“We want nothing to do with that but, if we know something that has relevance to a trial when a man’s life is literally on the line, if we know something, everybody should know that,” he said.