City says consolidation of 911 services unfeasible

The city said incompatibility between software its computer-aided dispatch system uses and the county’s software provider made consolidation of 911 services impractical and cost prohibitive.

Hot Springs and Garland County are preparing to move into new primary public safety answering points, or PSAPs, against the backdrop of 911 consolidation emerging as one of the dominant threads from last month’s Arkansas Emergency Management Conference at the Hot Springs Convention Center.

Calls for bringing multiple jurisdictions under a single dispatching regime have grown more pronounced as fees wireless and landline providers collect in support of 911 continue to fall short of costs local governments incur providing the service. The shortfall grew to more than $20 million in 2016, the state said. Legislation increasing the 65 cent fee wireless providers collect on monthly cellphone bills is expected to be introduced next year, but lawmakers may condition the increase on eliminating some of the state’s 127 PSAPs.

Emergency telephone service money the state remits to the city and county is shared on a population basis. The county gets two-thirds of the more than $500,000 annual allocation, and the city gets one-third.

Interim City Manager Bill Burrough said while consolidation may make sense for some jurisdictions, the county’s population of about 100,000 justifies the need for two communications centers that can receive 911 calls and dispatch emergency personnel.

“I agree the state has more PSAPs than we need, but when you look at the size of Garland County and the city of Hot Springs, it makes sense to have two primary PSAPs,” he said. “I don’t think it’s any more of a duplication of services than having a sheriff’s office and a police department. They’re both law enforcement agencies, but they serve separate needs.”

Former City Manager David Frasher rejected a consolidation proposal the county floated in late 2016, telling The Sentinel-Record the city wanted to retain its own policies and procedures for dispatching and answering 911 calls.

Burrough said different software used by the city and county made consolidation problematic. The city uses Spillman Technologies to power its computer-aided dispatch system, or CAD, and the police department’s records management and evidence inventory systems.

The county said it uses Southern Software. Merging the critical information retained by the systems would require a costly conversion or one of the jurisdictions forgoing its call history database. That repository alerts dispatchers to addresses where previous calls for service have been made, allowing them to apprise law enforcement of difficulties that may arise at the scene.

“We’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours in training on the Spillman system,” Burrough said. “We can’t walk away from our investment in that system.”

The city and county use different dispatching systems, but both of the new PSAPs will use AT&T Hosted Solutions to receive 911 calls. The new technology, part of what’s known as Next Generation 911, is expected to reduce transfers inherent to a county with two primary PSAPs and three secondary ones. Some callers are transferred numerous times before being connected to the appropriate dispatch center.

Burrough said the city will not build the stand-alone, seismic-complaint PSAP Frasher proposed, reducing what was more than a $1 million project by more than half. The new facility inside the police department will dispatch police, fire and emergency medical service under the city’s franchise agreement with LifeNet.

“That’s a decision I made with (Police Chief Jason Stachey and Fire Chief Ed Davis),” Burrough said. “We looked at the cost to build a seismic-compliant dispatch, and it didn’t seem to make sense. My philosophy on that is if we have an earthquake big enough to disrupt our dispatch center, we’ll have bigger issues we’ll be dealing with.”

The new PSAP is part of a $4.9 million public communications system upgrade funded by the 2.6 mills the Hot Springs Board of Directors levied during the 2016 and 2017 tax years. The city also budgeted $1.59 million in 2017 from its water, wastewater and solid waste funds. Burrough said using the enterprise funds to defray the cost made sense, as the upgrade includes allocating talk paths and radios for those three departments.

The county appropriated more than $700,000 in unanticipated 2016 revenue to pay for its new PSAP, which the county said could go live as early as this year. It’s part of a more than $5 million upgrade the county is making to its public safety communications system.

Burrough said the city hopes to unveil its new PSAP by the first quarter of next year. Stachey said the hundreds of Arkansas Wireless Information Network-capable radios that are also part of the upgrade have been ordered and are being programmed by Motorola.

“The upgrades both the city of Hot Springs and Garland County are doing will be investments in public safety that will serve the area well not only now but into the foreseeable future,” Burrough said, noting that the city and county will be able to communicate on one interoperable system. “It will be state of the art. We’ll have the finest public safety platforms in the state of Arkansas if not the country.”