“It went up because, frankly, until we had all of the jurisdictions on, and most importantly Dayton, we were really just estimating what our manpower need was going to be, what sort of systems were going to need to be in place and what were we going to bring in in revenue,” Montgomery County Administrator Deborah Feldman said Friday.
“What we have learned is that all dispatches are not created equal. ... We factored all that in so that our members feel like we’re billing the cost of the center fairly.”
The goal of countywide dispatch, which launched in 2009 in Miamisburg, was to provide the same or better police and fire dispatching service, at a lower cost. Feldman said she thinks the county has achieved both of those goals. But the results haven’t been the same for every jurisdiction.
Dayton joined the RDC for fire calls in August 2010 and for police calls in December 2010. City Manager Tim Riordan said Dayton is saving more than $1 million per year with regional dispatch, compared to running its own dispatch center in previous years. A comparison of current county data with a study run in 2006 indicates that total could be close to $2 million per year.
But Riverside, which had contracted with Montgomery County for dispatch even before the regional center opened, withdrew from the system to partner with Huber Heights in 2011, complaining that its costs at the RDC were escalating. City Manager Bryan Chodkowski said Riverside’s cost-per-dispatch went from less than $7 in 2007 to $11 in 2011.
“Few are benefiting, to the cost of many,” Chodkowski said. “I don’t think it’s sustainable in the way it’s currently structured. When you say, ‘Our rate structure isn’t working, and we’re driving people out of the market,’ something clearly has to change.”
Feldman would like to see more cities join the RDC, but she said it is sustainable in its current form.
Quality of service
Montgomery County Sheriff’s Capt. Rob Streck, who oversees the Regional Dispatch Center, said there has been good and bad with the switch. “Before, if there was a bank robbery in the city of Brookville, Brookville would have to call Englewood, and then call the county. Now, if a bank robbery goes out, there are 13 departments in the same geographical area all getting that info at once.”
He said dispatchers working for multiple police and fire departments do have to make sure they’re dispatching to the right jurisdiction.
“Callers all want to say “I’m in Dayton” (even if they’re in a neighboring suburb),” Streck said. “So yes, there is time spent where the call evaluator is saying, what cross streets do you see, what (landmark) do you see?”
Trotwood City Manager Mike Lucking said the transition to the Regional Dispatch Center has been seamless for his city.
Lt. Eric Henderson, Dayton police’s liaison with the RDC, said the service has been “pretty comparable” to Dayton’s former dispatching center, and said it has to be, “because a mistake could be a life.”
But Lt. Randy Beane, president of Dayton’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 44, said the RDC is inconsistent, and said he’s heard many complaints from officers.
“They have some dispatchers that are excellent,” he said. “But they have some who are not doing a good job, don’t know where streets are, can’t connect the dots, and they’re going to get somebody hurt.”
County officials have discussed a June incident in which confusion between police and dispatchers caused a 48-minute delay in responding to a man who had been hit with a baseball bat in east Dayton.
Cost of service
Chodkowski said Riverside left regional dispatch because of “an inability to control future costs.” He said moving to Huber Heights’ dispatch will save the city $300,000 over the next two years.
Feldman said that can be a temporary solution for an individual city, but a smaller dispatch center like Huber Heights has can only absorb one or two jurisdictions without major expansion, while the RDC is a long-term countywide solution.
Kettering City Manager Mark Schwieterman said his city heard multiple estimates of how much it would save by joining regional dispatch, but still said no. He said the $300,000 annual savings the city thought was possible was based on cost-per-dispatch numbers that have since gone up significantly.
“Those numbers were purely estimates, and the actual cost per call was greater than projected,” he said.
“We don’t know where that number would be today.”
Not every city is disgruntled about the cost increases. Trotwood will see perhaps the largest cost increase in 2012, but City Manager Mike Lucking said he understands it.
“It’s not at a time when we like to see increased costs, but we’re one of the largest users,” he said. “The Regional Dispatch Center is not a break-even proposition right now, and the county is subsidizing it out of their general fund. As I understand, they have no alternative but to raise costs.”
While some cities complained about the cost per dispatch, Feldman said a look at the cost per person favors the RDC. She said in 2006, dividing the cost of every dispatch center in the county by the total population revealed a per capita cost of $23.33 ($26.36 in today’s dollars).
She said the 2012 per capita cost for the roughly 335,000 residents covered by the RDC will be $22.90.
Despite those statistics, Feldman said the county is looking to lower costs further. She said with the number of dispatches down countywide, the seemingly simple solution — cut the number of dispatchers — doesn’t work. That’s because the number of calls received is actually up. Ten years ago, a car crash might have generated two 911 calls, but now with the proliferation of cellphones, that incident generates 10 or 20 calls, all of which must be answered.
Future of dispatch
Feldman said having the RDC structure in place sets the region up well for the future. Lucking agreed, and said the whole region should get on board.
“Clearly, the intent is to eliminate duplication of services,” he said. “The way it can best work is with everyone taking part, but that’s not happening here, so we have a smaller number of communities being forced to support the operation. That’s not the direction we should be going as a region. It just doesn’t make sense.”
But Feldman said while the door is open, the county is not having discussions with any of the cities currently separate from the RDC — Kettering, Huber Heights, Riverside, Centerville, Vandalia, Englewood, West Carrollton, Oakwood and Moraine. Those already using the RDC have now signed 20-year contracts and would have to pay a fee to exit early.
Schwieterman said he has no regrets about Kettering’s decision to improve its own system rather than join the county, but will watch the RDC while considering long-term plans. Oakwood City Manager Norbert Klopsch said those pushing regionalism must be careful not to eliminate what is now a healthy sense of local accountability.
But even Chodkowski, who pulled Riverside out of regional dispatch, said he’s seen it work well elsewhere, in some cases funded by a fee charged on local phone bills.
“Where you can be regional, you need to be regional,” he said. “In the next five to 10 years, I could see regional dispatch happening on larger scale.”
Feldman said she respects that each community has to make its own decision, but she agreed that the RDC would likely grow, and said the trigger likely will be the next time new technology forces dispatch centers to invest.
“As new technology comes down, it is going to be more and more difficult for individual communities to be able to make that type of capital investment, particularly when facing a more challenging financial environment than they were before,” she said.
“We have to decide, with the limited tax dollars available, is it smart to duplicate expenditures?”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2278 or jkelley@DaytonDailyNews .com.
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