From a cavernous room in a building at the Mound Advanced Technology Center in Miamisburg, 76 dispatchers currently take calls for 16 local police departments and 11 fire departments. Dayton fire, receiving about 33,500 calls a year, went live at the Regional Dispatch Center in August. Dayton fire Chief Herb Redden said there have been a few glitches in the transition, but no major problems. The Dayton fire budget for dispatch personnel in 2009 was about $1.28 million, Redden said. He estimates the department’s budget for dispatch services in 2011 will drop to about $384,000.
Capt. Rob Streck of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said preparations for the Dayton police transition to regional dispatch have taken two years and they’re in no hurry to rush the integration.
“If the slightest thing pops up we won’t make the switch,” he said.
Years of planning and preparation to bring the city of Dayton’s police dispatch online at the Montgomery County Regional Dispatch Center may be put to the test this week.
“We’ve been doing nonstop testing,” Capt. Rob Streck of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said. “We’re excited to finally get here.”
In 2006, when a consultant studied emergency dispatching in Montgomery County, there were 17 separate dispatch centers. The consultant concluded that taxpayers and municipalities would save about $5 million a year and get better coordination between communities in major disasters by replacing the separate centers with a consolidated center.
However, the county’s largest suburbs, Kettering and Huber Heights, opted not to join. Oakwood, Centerville, Englewood, Vandalia, West Carrollton and Moraine also decided not to join the regional operation.
Dayton police, with about 170,000 dispatches per year, is by far the largest department to sign on to the regional dispatch operation. Staff will remain at the Dayton’s Police Department’s Dispatch Center at 16 E. Monument Ave. in case of problems during the switch over.
“We’re going to make sure, either way, that the city is covered,” Dayton police Lt. Michael Martin said. “We’re going to take care of our citizens. We really hope any small glitches are worked out in a few minutes.”
A programming error in a Nortel switching device caused equipment failures at the Regional Dispatch Center on its first day of operations in March 2009. That equipment failure led to a late response at a Harrison Twp. house fire. It took fire crews nearly 15 minutes to get to the house, which was gutted by flames. The home’s owner survived. The center went offline until June 2009 when the glitches were fixed.
Dayton fire Chief Herb Redden said there were small glitches when his department switched over in August 2010. Most were associated with extra duties performed by Dayton dispatchers that are not offered by staff at the regional center.
“They’ve been very cooperative,” Redden said. “I think in time this will all work out.”
About 16 sworn personnel — officers, sergeants and lieutenants — currently working in the city’s dispatch operation will eventually be redeployed.
“We don’t have a time frame for transferring them out,” Martin said. “We want to make sure everything is up and running first.”
The center was developed to save money and improve services by combining several dispatch centers in the county into one central operation. Montgomery County Commissioner Dan Foley said the success of the facility — serving 17 police and 11 fire departments, including Dayton — shows regional initiatives can work.
“About 71.8 percent of the county’s population are supported by the consolidated dispatcher center. It’s working well,” Foley said. “It shows regional solutions can work and we should pursue more of them.”
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