New Dispatch Supervisor hired

The Bella Vista Police Department hired Christy Terry to fill a long-vacant dispatch supervisor position.

Capt. Tim Cook said he was glad to have the position filled. He has been performing the supervisor’s duties for roughly a year, he said, in addition to his typical workload.

“Excited to have her on board,” he said.

Terry started July 3. “I’ll be kind of a buffer between the police, the fire department and the dispatch office,” she said.

She worked for 15 years in Saline County dispatch in Benton, Ark., a service similar to Benton County’s Central Communications, she said. She served in the U.S. Navy as a corpsman from 1994 to 1998.

Terry said she was interested in moving to Northwest Arkansas and started looking for work in the area, then saw this job posted.

“I’m very pleased to have gotten the position,” she said.

Since she started, she said, she’s mostly been working on familiarizing herself with Bella Vista and the dispatch office’s tools. Each dispatch office, she said, may perform the same overall function, but the specific hardware and software can vary immensely.

“I’m coming in new and I come from a very different environment,” she said. “Coming here, it’s very different.”

She’s found the people in the department and even the callers, she said, to be very kind and easy to get along with.

Bringing in a new dispatcher, she said, is helpful because it puts a fresh set of eyes on the office. A newcomer, she said, may be able to see ingrained tendencies that could be improved upon.

She said she’d like to work some on quality assurance for calls and radio traffic. Additionally, she said, she’d like to implement more pre-arrival instructions.

Any changes, she said, will need to wait until the new budget cycle starts. She said she isn’t planning to make a great deal of changes with the office.

Terry said that she will have an informational booth at the department’s annual Night Out on Tuesday, Aug. 1, at Riordan Hall. The event is from 5 to 8 p.m.