The city and Bartholomew County are being asked to approve funding to hire six new 911 emergency dispatchers over the next two years.
Those employees are necessary to keep an additional dispatcher on duty to cover shifts during the E-911 center’s 24 hours a day, seven day a week schedule, while also covering for those on vacation, sick leave, or who have left for another job, said Todd Noblitt, Bartholomew County Emergency Operations 911 Center director.
As proposed by the center director, the hiring would be done at three different stages. The first two dispatchers would be hired this July at a cost of $73,718, Noblitt told the county council during their Monday work session. Noblitt also presented the proposal to the city council Wednesday.
Since the city pays 55 percent of salaries and benefits, city council members will be asked to contribute just more than $40,000 while the county council would appropriate about $33,000, Noblitt said.
Under the proposal, two more dispatchers will be brought on in January 2020, while the remaining two wouldn’t be hired until July 2020, Noblitt said.
That would bring the total amount required to pay for all six new dispatchers up to $378,000, he said. The city would pay $203,000 while the county would pay about $175,000, Noblitt said.
Now dispatching 20 different public safety agencies, the 911 center has experienced a substantial increase in calls for service from 98,009 in 2002 to 155,510 last year, Noblitt said.
But while experiencing a 58.6 percent increase in calls, the 911 center has only added two additional dispatchers during those 16 years, he said.
Due to several factors, including a number of dispatchers who resigned to take other jobs, a joint city and county public safety committee met in March to decide what steps needed to be taken to address the dispatcher shortage, Noblitt said.
A consensus was reached that the 911 center needs between 29 and 52 dispatchers, Noblitt said. If six more employees are hired as requested, that would bring the total number of dispatchers to 30, the 911 director said.
City councilman Frank Miller said he recently sat in on a shift at the operating center and said he was amazed to see how organized the four people on the shift were, despite one person calling in sick and another person working a 12-hour shift.
"If it was a busy night, I would be pulling my hair out," Miller said. "It’s quite a stressful job."
But while Noblitt may be requesting more funding, he’s also promising some significant savings in the future.
The installation of a new emergency dispatch system, which is largely being financed by federal and state money, will allow the local 911 center to reduce its annual budget by about $186,000 annually between 2021 and 2027, Noblitt said.
The new system is a "next-gen" system, Noblitt said, with technological advancements including feeding live data from the 911 center to officers arriving to a scene and vice versa. For example, if a police officer is wearing a body camera, the dispatcher could see what is going on from the officer’s perspective.
Noblitt said the new system could also better pinpoint where a call is coming from, even getting as close to defining what floor of a building a caller is on.
It was also announced Monday that Bartholomew County will receive an additional $1.186 million in local income tax revenue than originally anticipated.
If the county council approves the additional funding, the money would likely come from local income tax revenue earmarked for public safety, county council member Mark Gorbett said.
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The Bartholomew County Council will hear a request from Todd Noblitt, Bartholomew County Emergency Operations 911 Center director, at 6 p.m. June 11 on the fourth floor of the County Government Building, 440 Third St. regarding an additional appropriation to fund two new dispatchers after July 1.
No vote on the matter has been scheduled by the Columbus City Council at this time because they may already have sufficient funds to hire two new employees without additional appropriations.
City and county officials plan to wait until their 2020 budget talks this summer to discuss adding four more dispatchers next year.
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