Members of the Owensboro City Commission unanimously approved a memorandum of agreement with the county on Tuesday, and Daviess Fiscal Court will consider a similar measure on Thursday, June 20.
Operating costs at the 911 Emergency Operations Center usually hover just below the $3 million mark, split between the city and county according to agency-specific incident rates. The city's share dips slightly in the new agreement from 75% of total operations to 73% compared to the county's 27%.
According to the city's 2019-20 fiscal year budget, central dispatch operations will cost $2.9 million, $2.1 million of which the city will cover and $78,000 of which the county will.
"In the new agreement, the city’s share decreases from 75% to 73%, and we also remove a couple of sections with language that is no longer relevant, such as references to employee benefits that transferred when dispatch was initially combined and language that referred to projects already approved and funded," said City Manager Nate Pagan. "Otherwise, it's very straightforward."
The city and county consolidated operations in 2009.
Contrary to popular belief, the 911 Emergency Operations Center budget sharing agreement does not break down according to call volume, but generated incidents, said Director Paul Nave. Roughly 180,000 calls are received or generated from the center in any given year, of which 40% are 911 dials.
Not all dials generate incidents, and not all incidents are because of 911 calls. For example, he said, people mistakenly dial 911 all the time, which doesn't always mean a police officer needs to be dispatched to a location. Other times, individuals may call the police or fire departments in cases of emergency, meaning dispatch is needed to direct traffic and carry forward valuable, life-saving information.
The 73-27 percentage split is determined by about 120,000 incidents, Nave said. Some of those cancel each other out when both city-supported and county-supported agencies arrive.
It's a complicated arrangement, he said, but it has worked well for the last decade. At one time, both the city and county governments intended to construct a new dispatch center separate from any one particular agency, but, because of budget cuts, it was housed instead at the Owensboro Police Department headquarters on Ninth Street, where it remains to this day.
The joint department's budget was reduced in the 2019-20 budget by nearly a million dollars, but it's because of enormous capital investments the city and county made into computer-aided dispatching systems and related computer equipment in 2018. According to the agreement, the city and county will consider individual purchases like that on an as-needed basis.
Nave said he is grateful for the investment and that he appreciates elected officials' diligence in supporting individual needs. It is always costly to keep dispatch technology up to date, though, he added.
"We’re always trying to be at the cusp of technology because it’s always changing," he said. "We're always trying to improve things. We're currently looking at ways to allow video and picture transmission between callers and responding officers, and we recently invested in graphics to our phone system. We're always heavily invested in new technologies that benefit the callers."
Austin Ramsey, 270-691-7302, aramsey@messenger-inquirer.com, Twitter: @austinrramsey
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