WESTFIELD – The Legislative & Ordinance Committee voted 5-0 Monday night to make positive recommendation to the full City Council Thursday night to approve an ordinance creating a new dispatch department.
The L&O’s vote came following an hour-long presentation by officials of the Police and Fire departments and the Technology Center, where the new dispatch facility will be located.
The informational session was attended by the five L&O members, James E. Brown Jr, Mary O’Connell, Patti Andras, John J. Beltrandi III and James R. Adams as well as by Peter J. Miller Jr., Christopher Crean and Agma Sweeney.
The proposed ordinance will create a separate dispatch department and a supervisor position for that department.
Police Captain Hipolito Nunez said that a team consisting of police, fire and technology employees was formed to assess possible locations for the dispatch operations and technology needed to support that function.
“The Technology Center was picked for many reasons,” Nunez said. “It was designed with a dispatch center when it was built four years ago and has the technology to support dispatch operations, radio, phone and router systems, as well as having the Technology Center staff on hand to assist with any problems.
“The reason we’re in this direction is that it will provide a higher quality of service and will result in cost savings,” he said. “A larger aspect is that the state has mandated that by July 1, 2012 we have dispatchers qualified as emergency medical dispatchers.”
The Police Department currently has six civilian dispatchers who have all been certified through a 40 hour dispatcher course and a 24 hour emergency medical dispatcher (EMD) program. Dispatchers have to be re-certified every two years.
The city will have to hire and train three additional dispatchers to man the dispatcher center for three shifts, seven days a week (24-7). Nunez said that he currently has money available in a training grant that could be used to train the three new employees, but those funds have to be expended before the end of the current fiscal year, June 30, 2012.
Nunez said that if the council does not approve the new department, the city will still have to invest more than $300,000 to upgrade emergency response systems at the police and fire departments, as well as training police officers and firefighters in EMD at a cost of $671,000 over the next three years. The total cost of maintaining the current system over the next three years, including police officer and firefighter salaries, is $2.9 million.
Establishing the dispatch department will have a total cost of $1.3 million, yielding a total savings through cost avoidance of $1,346,282 over that same three-year span.
“The state, through the July 1 mandate, is trying to professionalize dispatching,” Nunez said. “In the near future it will push for regionalization. We’re trying to stay ahead of the game. If we don’t meet the July 1 mandate, the state could push us off to another community if we’re not ready. If we lose dispatch, we’ll have to pay another community to perform that function.”
Nunez said that the city is currently using the Agawam dispatch center for its backup because the technology at the Fire Department is too antiquated to serve as the city’s dispatch backup facility.
“When a call comes into the police station that we can’t take because we’re already dealing with other calls, it gets switched to Agawam, then they have to contact us and we have to call the Fire Department by a land line for fire and ambulance services,” Nunez said.
The state could also require 911 calls be sent to the state police facility in Northampton, which already happens with cell phone emergency calls. The state police would then have to contact either the police or fire departments to respond to the emergency.
Brown, the chairman of the L&O, a former Pittsfield police officer and now serving with Homeland Security, said that the time needed to relay those calls is critical in emergency situations.
“You lose minutes, which is unacceptable,” he said.
Nunez said that the state 911 officials contacted by the dispatch committee were “amazed that our police and fire departments came together on this, so they’re really happy with our situation. The most important thing to us is to improve the quality of (emergency response) services.”
Nunez said that he has discussed the regionalization of the dispatch department with other communities.
“Already one community will be with us and another has indicated interest,” he said. “Once we have three communities for regionalization, the state will fund a feasibility study to determine what facilities and equipment we may need based on the total call volume, then pay for that expansion.”
The system also has the ability to be expanded to include other city departments such as the Westfield Gas & Electric, Water and Public Works departments. Currently none of the city departments, including police and fire, have the ability to communicate by radio because of different frequencies assigned by the federal government. The dispatch center will have the technology to link all city departments to improve communication in emergency situations, such as tornadoes, floods and freak snowstorms.
“We do have a time constraint,” Nunez said. “We have a lot of work that needs to be done by July 1. Our vendors are on notice, they’re doing their work.
“We’re trying to do a lot of that work in-house to save money, Tech Center, Fire and Police personnel are working to move equipment and the [Westfield Vocational Technical High School] students will be taking down a wall that needs to be removed in the dispatch area at the tech center.”
