Mayor beefs up 911 calls budget
$8 million added to hire 90 new S.F. dispatchers
San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell’s upcoming budget will include $44 million worth of investments in San Francisco’s emergency response systems, including much-needed funding to hire and train more recruits for the city’s beleaguered 911 call center.
The 911 center, which is operated by the Department of Emergency Management, has struggled in recent years to meet the national standard of dispatchers responding to 90 percent of crisis calls within 10 seconds. Part of the blame goes to high turnover rates and the lingering effects of a 2008 hiring freeze. The center was the subject of intense scrutiny last year following a series of articles published by The Chronicle detailing the slow response times.
On Wednesday, Farrell is expected to announce that his proposed two-year budget will include $8 million in new funding, which will allow the Department of Emergency Management to train up to 90 additional recruits. Currently, about 127 full-time emergency dispatchers work at the department, and six who are part-time.
Officials say adding staff is critical if the city
wants to continue getting 911 response times down as the volume of calls continues to swell. The city considers emergency call center operations fully staffed at 165 dispatchers.
“San Francisco residents should feel confident that when they pick up the phone and call 911, that there’s a live person on the other end of the line waiting to take their call,” Farrell said. “This can literally be the difference between life and death, and, as mayor, I take this incredibly seriously.”
The number of calls to the city’s 911 dispatch center have risen 44 percent over the past seven years, which translates into 1,000 additional calls per day compared with 2011.
San Francisco 911 dispatchers answered around 686,000 calls last year, just over 411,000 of which were for actual emergencies, according to the Department of Emergency Management. There were 206,000 accidental 911 dials and another 69,000 that should have gone to the city’s nonemergency 311 service.
As the city works to handle more nonemergency incidents through its 311 system, Farrell has also proposed setting aside $670,000 so the city’s 311 operation can hire new staff to take on more calls for things like auto break-in reports, graffiti and other vandalism.
Emergency-call response times have been improving steadily after hitting a low point in April 2017, when the dispatch center was answering just 66 percent of calls within 10 seconds. Over the past six months, dispatchers have answered 911 calls within 10 seconds 88 percent of the time.
Anne Kronenberg, Department of Emergency Management executive director, said the last few years have been “painful” for her department, where dispatchers have been forced to work mandatory overtime to cover staff shortages brought on by retirement, turnover and attrition.
The department brought on 40 dispatchers last year, and another 37 are going through training, which typically takes nine months to a year.
With the prospect of bringing on 90 new dispatchers over the next two years, “we are really going to be in better shape,” Kronenberg said. “We were hurting, but we’re in a really good place now, and I’m so happy that the mayor sees how important this is to overall safety of San Francisco,” she said.
The largest portion of Farrell’s proposed emergency services budget — $15.9 million over two years — will go toward ongoing upgrades to the radio system used by the city’s police and fire departments and by sheriff ’s deputies. Kronenberg said the current system, which is being replaced in phases, “was at the end of its life 7½ years ago. We had police and firefighters carrying radios with two or three batteries at a time. The radios were so old the batteries wouldn’t hold a charge.”
In addition to buying new radios, the funding would also go toward installing new cell towers on the city’s southeast side, where the city’s never had them before, Kronenberg said. More coverage means better radio reception and clearer communication in places like Muni and BART tunnels.
Farrell’s funding would also earmark $900,000 to hire staff for an upcoming pilot program to create a new Department of Emergency Management Watch Center, a centralized hub used to monitor all major incidents taking place across the city, as opposed to the current model of standalone systems within each department. San Francisco is the only large urban area that doesn’t utilize a centralized threat-assessment system, Kronenberg said.
The city’s Fire Department would benefit from Farrell’s budget plan as well. The mayor’s proposal would set aside $1.5 million over two years to fund the staffing of a second quick-response vehicle operated by the Fire Department that can respond to the high number of calls for medical services emanating from the Tenderloin and Civic Center, which are home to some of the city’s most persistent and frequent homelessness and street behavior issues.
Farrell has also proposed spending $13.3 million over two years so the Fire Department can replace aging equipment, like ladder trucks, fire engines and ambulances.
Following a string of budget announcements in recent weeks detailing Farrell’s spending plans for homelessness, street cleaning and public safety, the mayor will present his proposed two-year budget to the Board of Supervisors on Friday.