Commissioner Dave Young told the group he is a businessman and is always asking why things are done the way they are. He suggested with today’s technology, local dispatch centers may have outlived their usefulness. He asked Lebanon City Manager Pat Clements and Franklin City Manager Sonny Lewis why they insist on keeping their centers separate.
“This is not the environment of funding for governments it once was,” Young said. “The answer should not be: ‘It’s the way we’ve always done it, or we want to create our own little fiefdoms and control our own destiny all the time.’”
Franklin officials said their city has gone through a number of changes regarding emergency services, and they have things working very well now and don’t want to short change their residents. He added that dispatchers perform multiple tasks that would still need to be covered if the center went away.
“We’ve chosen to maintain this, to be able to be self-sufficient,” said Police Chief Russell Whitman. “We’re up in the far corner, and we tend to be forgotten a lot of times. But we feel our citizens deserve the service they are getting today.”
Clements said his city went through an exercise in 2007 to determine if their dispatch center was valid and cost-efficient, and the conclusion was yes. Additionally, since the city runs its own electric service, they need a place for people to call after hours when the lights go out.
“It really is more than just a PSAP (public safety answering point), arguably the PSAP is a relatively small portion of what they do,” he said. “In the case of Lebanon, because we have a high density of utilities, that communications center functions as city hall during off hours. There is a lot of non-public safety related business going on out of that communication center.”
A relatively new law sets a graduated schedule for reducing the number of dispatch centers that caps the number at three starting in 2018. Since the county is at that level now, and the cities want to keep their centers, there is little more to be discussed on the point. Butler County on the other hand has eight dispatch centers and will lose some funding if they don’t trim down to three.
County Administrator Dave Gully said the state is pushing for consolidating 911 dispatch centers statewide. With the advent of expensive technology that allows people to send texts and pictures to dispatch centers, he said the push may make Warren County’s wishes moot.
“The decision of whether or not Lebanon and Franklin have a PSAP may be taken away from them by legislation five years from now, when the entire state converts to next generation 911,” he said.
As for the current funding in Warren County, Clements said he would be willing to talk about reallocating the state funds, because he said it looks like the split may have been made arbitrarily. The county gets $250,000 of the state 911 funds and Franklin and Lebanon each get $125,000.
Mike Bunner, director of emergency services, said over a three-year average, the county handled 77 percent of the wireless calls to dispatch, Franklin took 14 percent and Lebanon fielded 9 percent of the calls. He suggested Lebanon’s take of state funds be reduced by $82,000 and Franklin’s $56,000.
The group will meet again next month to continue discussions about the funding.
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