By Daniel Walmer
The Sentinel
CARLISLE, Pa. — Long before western Cumberland County police chiefs ignited a firestorm of controversy over the responsiveness of the county’s 911 Communications Center, former Cumberland County Public Safety Director Ted Wise said the center was recognized as a “model for much of the commonwealth.”
Still, there were problems on the horizon. According to Wise, the center needed more employees to function properly — but the county commissioners would not give him the staffing level he needed.
Wise suddenly submitted his retirement within a few days of an Aug. 27 meeting in which Shippensburg Police Chief Fred Scott said there were instances of officers being placed on hold while conducting a traffic stop.
He recently spoke to The Sentinel, explaining the events surrounding his retirement and expressing skepticism of alternatives to full-time staffing that are currently being implemented.
County chief clerk Larry Thomas, on the other hand, said Wise had resisted methods for improvement, and plans that have been implemented since his retirement have improved the quality of service from the dispatch center.
Need for staffing
Wise had been advocating for additional staffing for years, he said. His case met a road bump, however, when Public Financial Management, hired by the county to identify possible solutions to a funding imbalance, suggested that too many nonemergency phone calls were being answered by trained 911 center staff.
Public safety responded in March that PFM’s definition of nonemergency calls was “greatly misleading” and the department was in need of additional members, he said. Between then and the Aug. 27 meeting at which Scott and others confronted the commissioners, “I was never given the opportunity to ... address my needs in terms of staffing,” he said.
Thomas said there were ongoing conversations with Wise about ways to improve staffing efficiencies, and he was encouraged to consider hiring part-time staff.
Staffing levels never dipped beneath the eight-employee minimum the public safety management team felt was required to provide adequate coverage on an average day, he said. Still, that left no margin for unexpected events that could tie up officer time, Wise said.
While Scott was concerned with an unspecified number of specific instances of his Shippensburg police officers being placed on hold, Wise said he was focused more on the department’s overall “grade of service.” The emergency dispatch industry uses a statistical analysis regarding call volumes, the number of dispatchers, and the number of calls each dispatcher can handle in an hour — and it was based on that analysis that he was requesting additional staff, he said.
Retirement
Things got worse between Thomas and Wise the week following the Aug. 27 meeting — so bad that Wise said he would have had to act unethically, face disciplinary action or retire.
Thomas sent Wise an “ultimatum” email on Friday, Aug. 29, directing him to increase staffing levels for the Labor Day weekend by using management personnel to increase the amount of call-takers, he said. That placed him in the impossible position of fixing a long-term problem in three hours, he said — especially since many management employees were not qualified to serve as dispatchers, and he did not have information immediately available about which employees were qualified.
“Their job is not to just walk in there and start answering phones,” he said. “That’s the same thing as saying ... if we need a nurse in the nursing home, we’ll just put someone from administration on the floor because they work in the same office.”
At that point, Wise said, he believed he was “being singled out for a punitive action” by Thomas because the county did not like what happened at the Aug. 27 meeting with the police chiefs. He decided to do his best to appropriately schedule staff but also expedite his retirement.
“(Thomas) decided to make it personal,” he said. “He was going to show me that I’d been there too long ... and it was time to make a change, and get rid of the old and bring in the new. I chose to maintain my principles. I wasn’t going to violate those principals and jeopardize the health, safety and welfare of the citizens.”
Thomas said he was not asking Wise to use unqualified management employees to handle dispatch calls, but to use qualified ones.
“We were shocked to find out that our management staff out there was not certified to be on those phones,” he said. “From my background, every decent ... managerial staff would be ready to jump in at a moment’s notice.”
“Once (Wise) made that clear, we did not say put unqualified or uncertified people on there,” he added.
Thomas also said it was not accurate to say Wise was singled out because of the Aug. 27 meeting. That meeting did “heighten tensions,” he said, but the real issue was Wise’s long-term apparent unwillingness to consider flexible, creative and adaptive short-term solutions.
“He seemed to be nonresponsive to our request that he get in there and try to find at least a temporary fix to the problem,” Thomas said.
Future improvements
Wise said he was also upset at the commissioners for allowing Thomas to drive 911 center policy rather than the experienced public safety employees.
“(Thomas) comes along and said it could be done better, and I have not seen a product yet that improves on what we created,” he said.
Thomas has said he is listening to feedback from and collaborating with 911 center staff in developing ways to improve the center without hiring additional full-time staff.
County officials have outlined some of those steps — including hiring part-time staff and using a computer-based scheduling system — and long-term initiatives are on the way.
Without increased full-time staffing, however, Wise isn’t sure they will work.
“Where are we at? I don’t know,” he said.
He suspects the staffing situation may have improved somewhat with the hiring of part-time staff and the fact that employees use less vacation days in the fall months, so there could be more employees available to work, he said.
He said he would have hired part-time employees if permitted to do so — although he thinks it doesn’t make sense to use too many part-time dispatchers given the need for extensive training and schedule reliability once trained.
Thomas, however, said Wise had been specifically encouraged in discussions to consider hiring part-time staff. In response to Wise’s belief that hiring part-time dispatchers is not efficient, he pointed at the currently successful 911 center as evidence that they can work.
“They found ways to identify appropriate people. I think the difference was the willingness to give it a shot,” he said.
County officials said they received praise from police chiefs at an October meeting for improvements in the center’s quality of service.
Non-emergency calls
Wise also isn’t sold on one of the county’s long-term ideas — the creation of a nonemergency answering system to handle calls that do not need to be answered by a highly trained dispatcher.
First, Wise is not convinced that people’s habits can be changed so that they only call the 911 center in the event of an actual emergency. If they don’t call the county center, he is concerned that they will call municipal police departments, placing a larger burden on those agencies.
Finally, he questioned whether or not the number of truly nonemergency calls are enough to justify the hiring of specific employees for those calls.
Thomas said there are still issues that needed to be worked out before a nonemergency call answering system can be implemented, such as ensuring that the burden does not fall to local police and ensuring that any emergency calls that mistakenly arrive at the nonemergency phone number are efficiently forwarded to emergency dispatchers. However, an external work group including different facets of the emergency response community is currently examining those issues, he said.
He also acknowledged that there is a debate over how many calls to the 911 center are truly nonemergency, with estimates ranging from 25 percent to 60 percent. Even if the low-end numbers are accepted, however, Thomas believes a nonemergency call answering system could result in cost-savings and free properly trained employees to handle emergency calls.
The county is considering other ways to reduce emergency center call volumes, such as a “silent dispatch” system for first responders to check-in and check-out, he said.
As for the possibility that the situation may have improved because of decreased vacation time in the fall, “I don’t buy that,” he said.
“I think the steps that the staff at the 911 center have taken ... to ensure the dispatchers are ready and available to the first responders have had a positive effect,” Thomas said. “Regardless of the time of season, there are going to be emergencies that are going to up the level of calls, and you have to be prepared for that.”
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©2014 The Sentinel (Carlisle, Pa.)