City, county weigh 911 operation consolidation
The city of Hot Springs and Garland County submitted a plan to combine their 911 operations, but City Manager Bill Burrough said that doesn’t mean they are committed to consolidation.
The city would move to the county’s 911 Communications Center, in the booking area of the old county jail on Ouachita Avenue. It has five fully equipped dispatch consoles, with the capacity to add another five, County Judge Darryl Mahoney said.
The city and county are projected to receive $1.4 million in public safety surcharge fees this year. Collected and remitted by wireless providers, the fees support 911 operations at the roughly 100 public safety answering points statewide.
As part of the statewide consolidation mandated by 2019 legislation, the state 911 Board has said funding from the surcharge would be limited to one of the two public safety answering points in Garland County. Submitting a consolidation plan ensured funding for both facilities would continue through the end of next year.
The city receives about $500,000 a year, and the county gets close to $1 million. Neither is sufficient to fully fund either PSAP, as the city and county general funds subsidize both facilities. The county 911 fund’s projected 2023 revenue included a $960,000 general fund transfer.
“We haven’t made the decision we’re going to consolidate,” Burrough said Friday. “I don’t think that’s in the best interest of the citizens and residents we serve or the community. The decision that will have to be made is whether we lose our funding, or whether we consolidate.
“We’re not saying we’re opposed to the consolidation. We just don’t think it’s in the best interest long term from redundancies standpoints and other things.”
The city and county appealed the 911 Board’s consolidation decision last fall but were denied. The plan they submitted in December showed a combined annual wireless 911 call volume of 90,000, a number they said warranted funding for two PSAPs.
“Any given day we could have 250,000 people here,” Burrough, referring to the area’s tourism economy, said. “We’re not just a city of 38,000.”
The city said it spent $624,224 upgrading its PSAP inside the Hot Springs Police Department. The $3.54 million raised by the temporary property tax the Hot Springs Board of Directors levied in the 2016 and 2017 tax years paid for the upgrade.
Consultants the city hired recommended it expand its PSAP. But the same consultants, Federal Engineering of Virginia, recommended the city and county consolidate 911 operations in its 2021 report to the 911 Board.
The city stopped paying Federal Engineering and has talked about trying to recoup money that’s already been paid on the $415,062 contract the Hot Springs Board of Directors awarded in 2017 to advise the city on its more than $6 million communications upgrade.
“We do have a lot invested in building out our dispatch center,” Burrough said. “We had Federal Engineering moving us into that direction, and on the other hand, they’re moving the state into consolidation. So we don’t feel like the left hand knew what the right hand was doing from that standpoint. That’s something I’m not pleased with.”
The plan called for combining equipment from both facilities.
“We’re not going to lose all of our investment in the dispatch center if we move it,” Burrough said. “The largest cost is the stations, and those could be moved to the dispatch center on Ouachita.
“We need more room in our police department. We would welcome the additional space to be able to move some of our other portions of the department into that area.”
Under the plan, a consolidated PSAP would be under the county judge’s authority. It would operate according to policies and procedures decided by a board comprising the sheriff, city police and fire chiefs, a rotating chief representing volunteer fire protection districts, LifeNet, the county judge and city manager.
The current dispatching staff at both facilities would be offered jobs. A unified call center would employ eight to 12 call takers and about two dozen dispatchers working in shifts of six to seven.
“We still have a lot of things we need to make decisions on,” Burrough said. “We’re working together. It’s not an adversarial issue between the city and the county. We’re going to work for what’s best for the community, not just the city or the county.”
That kind of collaboration wasn’t at the fore of earlier city-county discussions about 911 operations. They invested in PSAP upgrades as the state was warning that many jurisdictions could lose funding.
It was the dominant topic at the 2018 Arkansas Emergency Management Conference at the Hot Springs Convention Center. The state said the cost of operating more than 100 PSAPs exceeded 911 revenue from wireless providers by $20 million annually.
Consolidation was seen as a way to narrow the gap, leading to the 2019 law that resulted in the 911 Board’s decision to limit state funding to one PSAP in Garland County.
The city and county resisted consolidation. They cited the incompatibility of their computer-aided dispatch systems as an impediment to a unified call center. The consolidation plan they submitted in December noted the differences in the two systems.