New county 911 center director plans to up staff
Center budgeted for 44 dispatchers, has 34
The new director of Santa Fe County’s regional dispatch center, who had been serving in the position on an interim basis since June, stepped into the long-term job this week with a plan to hire more employees and roll out technology upgrades.
Vanessa Marquez, 42, took over as interim director of the Santa Fe Regional Emergency Communications Center after longtime Director Ken Martinez retired. The center’s board of directors — an oversight body that includes the city and county managers, the police chief and sheriff, and the city and county fire chiefs — approved her appointment to the position Sept. 5.
She will earn about $88,400 per year, according to a county spokeswoman.
Marquez spoke Tuesday — her first official day in the position — with the Santa Fe Public Safety Committee.
She said she began her career as a dispatcher with the city in 1997, before the 911 center expanded to include the county.
“So I’m going into my 22nd year in dispatch in the same place,” she said.
Committee Chairman and City Councilor Christopher Rivera, a former Santa Fe fire chief, congratulated Marquez and thanked her for “stepping up.”
The 911 center, which operates 24/7 and handles thousands of calls from city and county residents each month, is budgeted for 44 dispatchers but has only 34, which could be a factor in significant dispatch time increases, especially for calls within city limits.
In August alone, Marquez told the Public Safety Committee, the center handled 34,697 calls, both incoming and outgoing. About 55 percent of those were emergency calls for service, and 58 percent of the service calls were handled by the Santa Fe Fire Department, Animal Services Division and police.
The dispatch center also operates a drug tip hotline and can dispatch emergency calls to that line or route them to the police department’s Narcotics Division for follow-up. So far this year, the center has received 288 calls to the hotline.
“So you can see, there’s a lot of calls coming in,” Marquez said. “We’re working on our staffing.”
Public Safety Committee member Stephen Tapke said he was concerned the center could be lagging behind national standards when it comes to call volume.
“I would encourage you to take a look at national staffing standards for your center, and see where you fit in that model,” Tapke told Marquez.
The center recently boosted starting pay for dispatcher trainees to $16 per hour.
It also has been working with the union to increase pay for employees, Marquez said, adding she was looking at making a change to “peak-load staffing.” Rather than have a minimum of eight dispatchers, including a supervisor, all day and night, she said, she might alter staffing levels to better accommodate times when the center receives the most calls.
According to recent statistics provided by Santa Fe police, the median time from the start of a 911 call until an officer is dispatched for the most serious calls — “priority one” — had increased by more than 43 percent from January through July compared with the same period in 2018. Response times for priority two calls were up by more than 62 percent, and priority three calls rose more than 45 percent.
In another effort to improve the center’s operations, Marquez said, it is planning to implement a new computer-aided dispatch system, with “go-live” tests Nov. 13 and 14.
Implementation of the system already has had some hiccups, a Santa Fe police captain said at the Public Safety Committee meeting, as some police vehicles have laptops that are not yet compatible with the new dispatch system and could be operating “blind.”
Marquez said the Santa Fe County Sheriff ’s Office has had similar issues.
The center would maintain its existing system as a backup if problems arise during implementation, she said.