By Mark Zaretsky
New Haven Register
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — The future of the South Central Connecticut Regional Emergency Communications System — CMED South Central — is up in the air following decisions by two of its biggest members and contributors, New Haven and West Haven, to pull out.
The West Haven City Council followed New Haven’s lead late Tuesday night and voted unanimously to withdraw from CMED, which serves as an electronic connection between emergency responders and area hospitals. The withdrawal, like New Haven’s, is effective June 30.
Hamden is said to be close behind and is likely to go in with New Haven and West Haven in a new emergency medical dispatching venture, although the matter has yet to go before Hamden’s Legislative Council, officials from all three municipalities said.
The three communities are among the largest served by CMED South Central, which provides emergency medical dispatching for an 18-town area stretching from Milford in the west to Madison in the east and Meriden in the north.
“Our concern is that we’re being overcharged, and that nobody listens,” said New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, whose city would have faced a 9.5 percent increase in CMED costs had it continued to participate into the next fiscal year.
New Haven Wednesday closed a request for proposals from companies seeking to provide emergency dispatching communications after June 30.
There were two bidders: CMED and AMR, or American Medical Response, the ambulance company that is the primary responder to medical emergencies in New Haven. Details on each organization’s proposal were not immediately available.
West Haven is expected to seek similar proposals soon and Hamden will follow suit if its council also votes to leave CMED.
“Basically, what’s happened is, they’ve practically priced themselves out of the market,” said Abe Colon, West Haven’s 911 emergency reporting system director, speaking to the City Council before the vote.
Other West Haven officials, including Allingtown Fire Chief Peter Massaro and West Haven Fire Department Deputy Chief Scott Schwartz, said it’s also about quality and speed.
“CMED is getting antiquated,” and these days, “there’s really no need for them,” said Massaro.” With our own CAD (computer-aided dispatch) system, we’ll be able to do what they do, automatically.”
Colon said that without New Haven, any costs “would be divided among the remaining towns.” He estimated that withdrawing from CMED is likely to cut West Haven’s cost for emergency medical dispatching — currently $109,000 — in half.
New Haven currently pays $352,000 of CMED’s $1.67 million annual budget, plus a $39,222 state subsidy that the state pays directly to CMED, said Rick Fontana, deputy director for operations of New Haven’s Office of Emergency Management.
That compares to $120,559 that Hartford pays to CMED North Central, plus a $37,000 state subsidy, and $131,385 that Bridgeport pays to the Southwestern Regional Communications Center, plus a $43,691 state subsidy, Fontana said.
Harp said CMED long has depended on New Haven and the other larger communities for what she believes is an unfair percentage of its revenue.
CMED “provides more extensive services for some of the smaller communities, and New Haven subsidizes those services ... and we can’t afford to carry them anymore,” Harp said. “So what we’re saying is, they can bid on it and if the price is reasonable, we’ll go with them.
“That’s it,” she said. “They’ve got to reduce the price or we’ve got to go somewhere where we can get a better price.”
According to Fontana, Bethany pays $1,539 annually for CMED to serve as its 911 dispatching center.
Fontana said a debate has been going on behind the scenes since 2008, when then-New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. sent a letter warning CMED that the city could pull out.
“We talked until we were blue in the face to try to get CMED to understand,” but it only lowered its price by a little, said Fontana, a former West Haven firefighter.
He said New Haven and its neighbors can do better.
“In the past year, we have kind of stopped all communications with CMED ... We don’t do anything with CMED anymore. The calls come in and go straight” to the ambulance company.
“We bypass the middleman,” Fontana said. “The middleman costs us money and ... more importantly, the middleman costs us time.
“In the past two years, we have gone directly to AMR,” he said. The same is true of West Haven, Hamden and Milford, Fontana said.
The South Central Regional Council of Governments was to have discussed the issue at its regular monthly meeting Wednesday morning, but cancelled the CMED discussion because CMED officials were out of town at an emergency management conference.
CMED South Central Executive Director Gary Stango did not return a message seeking comment left on his voicemail or a message that a CMED staffer said he would relay to Stango.
West Haven’s move follows closely behind a similar unanimous decision earlier this month by the New Haven Board of Alders.
Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson said Wednesday that if New Haven and West Haven pull out, Hamden is not in a position to pay more to take up the slack.
“We are going to be following the route that New Haven and West Haven took,” said Hamden Fire Chief David Berardesca, although he emphasized that “it will have to go through the regular route” through the Legislative Council.
“I have nothing against CMED. It’s a great service,” Berardesca said. But “we want to get the best value that we can for our community, without jeopardizing safety.”
Currently, “basically, the bigger towns are paying the freight,” he said.
But “it’s not all monetary,” Berardesca said. “Really, the bottom line, it’s about public safety and efficiency of the system and cost would probably be the last part of it.
“I believe we can get a value from a system at less cost than we’re paying now. But also with that, I believe we can get a better system,” he said.
Besides New Haven, West Haven and Hamden, CMED’s members are Ansonia, Bethany, Branford, Derby, East Haven, Guilford, Madison, Meriden, Milford, North Branford, North Haven, Orange, Shelton, Wallingford, and Woodbridge.