By Eric Fleischauer
The Decatur Daily
DECATUR, Ala. — The Decatur City Council is clashing with Morgan County 911 about a standardized annual dispatch contract, despite the fact the cost of that contract has dropped by $167,000 since fiscal 2008.
The contract expired Sept. 30, but Morgan County 911 director Ryan Welty said he has no plan to discontinue dispatch services for the city.
At a work session last week, five weeks after city officials received the proposed MC911 contract and one day before the previous contract expired, council members raised objections.
The main objection was to a change in the late fee MC911 would charge the city if it were delinquent in monthly payments. Last year’s contract imposed a late fee of 1 percent of the monthly tab. The MC911 board offered an increase to 10 percent.
“You’re going to have to explain how you can justify 10 percent per month,” Councilman Chuck Ard said at a work session last Monday. “That’s 120 percent per year. You should be applying for a title-pawn license.”
MC911 Director Ryan Welty said his seven-member board, which includes three Decatur City Council appointees, unanimously approved the change.
MC911 has a $3.04 million annual budget. A portion of its revenue comes from dispatch services for ambulances.
In the past year, two of those ambulance services — Decatur Emergency Medical Services Inc. and Crossroads — went out of business, leaving unpaid bills at MC911.
Welty said his concern is that a late payment by Decatur or any of the other agencies could cause problems if it overlapped with an ambulance service going out of business. The increased penalty, he said, was not to collect revenue — Decatur has never been late on a monthly payment — but to ensure no municipality or agency elects to delay a payment during a time when MC911 is struggling from an insolvent ambulance carrier.
Unlike most city contracts, cost of the MC911 contract dropped between fiscal 2014 and fiscal 2015. The annual cost last year was $435,932. The cost in fiscal 2015, if the city adopts the contract, will be $427,524 — 14 percent of the annual cost of operating MC911’s dispatch center.
Seventy-six percent of MC911’s budget comes from fees collected through telephone bills and is distributed by the state. Fees from agencies that use MC911 account for 20 percent of its budget.
Welty said the reason the city keeps paying less for dispatch services is tied to the reason MC911 needs a standardized contract.
Before 2000, Decatur had its own dispatching service. MC911 evolved when technological changes — primarily the ability to track the location of individual emergency vehicles and the increased use of cellphones — required large capital expenditures. Initially, MC911 charged Decatur about the same amount Decatur had paid for its own dispatch center, $594,149 per year.
In recent years, MC911 recognized the efficiencies of providing service to as many cities and agencies within the county as possible. Not only does it give MC911 the ability to coordinate faster responses, it reduces the cost to MC911 customers.
The advantages of centralized dispatching to the person calling 911 are evident in a visit to the dispatch center.
When a call comes in from Decatur, a single dispatcher collects the information from an often-frantic caller. Because MC911 dispatches all police, fire and ambulance calls in the city, the dispatcher immediately can locate the closest units to the caller.
A 911 call from the county often is more complex, because the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department does not use MC911’s dispatch services. The MC911 dispatcher still must collect information on the location of the caller and the nature of the emergency. Then, if the emergency requires law enforcement personnel, the MC911 dispatcher must forward the 911 call to the Morgan County sheriff’s dispatcher. At that point, the caller must repeat the information for a different dispatcher.
“For the four municipalities where we dispatch law enforcement, you call here and no matter what you need emergency-services wise, whether it’s police, fire or ambulance — a lot of times it’s a combination — then the caller only has to talk to one person, and we dispatch that all from this room,” Welty said.
The only emergency services in the county that do not use MC911 dispatching are the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department and the police departments in Hartselle and Somerville. MC911 dispatches for all ambulances and fire departments in the county.
“To give the citizen the best possible service, we need to dispatch all three services (fire, police and ambulance) countywide,” Welty said.
While Welty’s focus is on the speed with which a 911 caller can get assistance, he said adding agencies to the MC911 umbrella also benefits Decatur. When Hartselle Fire and Falkville Police departments contracted with MC911 last year, it decreased the cost to Decatur.
Welty said the MC911 board feels it is important the contracts with each governmental entity be identical. If Decatur, which accounts for 69 percent of the call volume, gets preferential treatment, political divisions could result that would discourage other agencies from using MC911.
That, said Welty, would be a bad result for people calling 911, and it would increase costs for Decatur and other municipalities that use MC911.
The standardized fiscal 2015 contract that has Decatur City Council on edge has the same charge per dispatched call for every agency MC911 serves: $4.04, down from $4.47 last year.
At Monday’s work session, Ard and Kirby also complained the MC911 contract does not include what Kirby referred to as “performance criteria.”
“I’ve worked in this field 15 years, and I don’t know what you mean by performance criteria,” Welty responded.
After the meeting, Kirby listed several complaints he had with MC911 performance. Most involved actions that had a negative impact on First Response, Decatur’s sole ambulance carrier.
Kirby said MC911 should not be charging First Response for dispatching non-emergency transport calls. He said MC911 was lax in notifying city officials when First Response’s former competitor, Decatur Emergency Medical Services Inc., had fewer ambulances operating than the city code required.
“It appears to me Mr. Kirby is an advocate for First Response,” Welty said.
Welty said adding some sort of performance requirements in the Decatur contract would preclude the possibility of standardized contracts with all municipalities in the county, which he said could lead to resentment that would harm the goal of countywide centralized dispatching for all emergency services.
“If I am giving preferential treatment to Decatur in the contract, it makes my job harder,” Welty said.
Moreover, he said, such a contractual provision is unnecessary.
“Morgan County 911 is not government,” Kirby said. “It is merely a private entity. If we’re paying for service, we have every right to be able to evaluate and remedy poor performance.”
Like the city of Decatur, MC911 — the formal name of which is the Morgan County Emergency Management Communications District — is a subdivision of the state. State law requires that it be subject to a local board, and it also is regulated by the state 911 Board.
Welty said his staff compiles detailed statistics on MC911 performance each month. They are public records, he said, and are available to any municipality or citizen. He is subject to a local board that includes three members appointed by the Decatur City Council, and the board meetings are open to the public.
“If someone has a problem, they give me a call,” Welty said. “We investigate it, we look at (computer) records, and we play the tapes. Occasionally we interview employees, and we figure out what happened. Then we correct it.”
At last week’s work session, Mayor Don Kyle proposed unilaterally revising the MC911 contract, changing the 10 percent late fee to 1 percent.
“Why not put 1 percent in the document, pass it, and send it back and put it on their shoulders?” Kyle said.
Hammon agreed. The council will vote today on the revised contract. If it passes, the MC911 board will vote Oct. 16 on whether to accept the city’s change.
Welty said he fears the City Council is trying to fix something that is not broken, and that it may cause damage in the process.
“Our mission is to save lives and protect property,” Welty said. “We’re highly effective at that mission.”
Eric Fleischauer can be reached at 256-340-2435 or eric@decaturdaily.com. Follow on Twitter @DD_Fleischauer.
Breakdown of 911 calls
Morgan County 911 collects 20 percent of its $3.04 million annual budget by charging its customers for each dispatched call. In 2013, it dispatched 154,389 calls. Below is a breakdown of those calls, by department:
Decatur Police, 64%
Ambulance services, 16%
Decatur Fire, 4.6%
Volunteer fire, 4.3%
Falkville Police, 3.6%
Priceville Police, 3.6%
Trinity Police, 2.7%
Hartselle Fire, 1.2%
Source: Morgan County 911
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©2014 The Decatur Daily (Decatur, Ala.)