Council wants to work with county for 911 dispatching
By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette / WBRT Radio
Tuesday, June 7, 2016, 11 p.m. (ADDED video, June 9, 2016) — The Bardstown City Council did not vote regarding the future of its involvement in the city county dispatch center Tuesday night, but the consensus of the council was clear — the city must first try to forge new dispatch agreement before the council will consider shifting emergency dispatching to the Kentucky State Police.
Councilman Fred Hagan discusses the issues facing the city-county dispatch center.
Councilman Fred Hagan told the council he had met with dispatch officials, attended the Nelson Fiscal Court meeting last week, and then traveled to Frankfort to meet with officials in the Commercial Mobile Radio Service (CMRS) board Tuesday to talk with them about dispatching issues.
The CMRS is the state government entity that certifies 911 dispatch centers in Kentucky.
“In a nutshell, they are very much against us splitting up an existing dispatch center,” he said. “They’ve never taken an existing dispatch area and then tried to pick a piece out and set it aside. It’s never been done and they don’t know how to do it.”
Hagan said the real issue is not a question of KSP’s abilities to do the city’s emergency dispatching or even the type of computer-aided dispatch software being used.
“It has to do with the nuances and the nuts and bolts of taking an existing system and plucking out a certain number of phones,” he said.
Hagan said the CMRS representatives were frank and honest, and had substantial expertise in making their thoughts know about the possible split between the city and the joint city-county dispatch center.
“That tells me everything I need to know,” he said.
Hagan said from his perspective the issues facing dispatch may boil down to a personnel problem and making sure dispatchers know what they are supposed to do, have adequate training and are supervised properly.
“If they’re not, that’s a people problem,” he said. “We shouldn’t try to solve that by going to KSP, we should solve that by doing good leadership and good management.”
Councilwoman Kecia Copeland said the dispatch issue was an opportunity for the council to reverse 18 months of issues dividing the city and county governments.
Hagan said the city should invest in needed training, buy the needed equipment to improve police communications and stay part of the joint dispatch center — as long as the city can renegotiate the dispatch agreement in order to give the city better representation.
Mayor John Royalty told Hagan that the city needs to have equal representation on the dispatch board. As it stands now, the city only has two representatives, the fire chief and police chief.
“We have votes — two people — but we pay the biggest part of dispatch,” he said.
Hagan noted that in his review of 18 months of dispatch board minutes, there were a number of meetings when no city representative attended the dispatch meetings. Councilman Roland Williams told the council he had observed the same thing.
Royalty suggested that the past fire chief may not have attended the meetings because he knew he didn’t really have a real say in what the board did.
“They haven’t had a say, and they haven’t had a vote, they haven’t been able to get their concerns voiced,” he said.
CITY CAN TAKE COUNTY’S NEW 911 FEE. City Attorney Tim Butler questioned the county government’s ability to assess a fee in the city limits, and recommended the council pass its own ordinance to mirror the county’s 911 fee.
If the city has its own ordinance, it can supersede the county’s 911 fee ordinance and that fee would go to the city rather than the county. The city could decide where that portion of the dispatch money goes.
City Attorney Tim Butler, left, talks with Larry Green, the city’s human resources director, prior to the start of Tuesday’s special-called council meeting.
Butler again stated his concerns with the existing agreement that governs the dispatch board/ The city has no control over what the dispatch board does or the decisions it makes, yet is responsible for paying 40 percent of what is spent.
“Never, never, never would I ever, ever, ever recommend you enter into an agreement where you don’t have control,” Butler said.
“Right now we have an interlocal agreement whereby basically, they can say, ‘Give us the money and shut up’ as far as I can tell.”
Hagan said he thought the next step would be for Butler and County Attorney Matthew Hite to work on revising that agreement.
Councilmen Francis Lydian and Roland Williams agreed with Hagan, each was in favor of the city and county working on a new dispatch agreement.
Councilman Bill Buckman — who has been a very vocal critic of the dispatch center — said he would vote to stay with the county dispatch if the communications issues can be fixed and the agreement can be satisfactorily revised.
Councilwoman Kecia Copeland said she considered the dispatch discussion as an opportunity to change the relationship between the city and county governments.
“For the past 18 months we have separated from the county,” she said. “Now we have a chance to come together and stay with the county if we can make the interlocal agreement right.
“But we have to listen to what each side is saying and not fall on deaf ears,” she said.
There was no timetable or deadline discussed for moving forward with negotiations with Nelson Fiscal Court.
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