By James Mayse
The Messenger-Inquirer
OWENSBORO, Ky. — Over the next 10 months, officials planning the consolidation of the city and county’s 911 dispatch centers at the Owensboro Police Department will undertake a mountain of work.
Between now and July 1 -- the intended date the combined center will open -- equipment will have to be purchased and installed at OPD, a new communications tower will need to be built, and dispatchers will have to learn a new signal system for dispatching law enforcement officers to emergencies.
“We’re going to (be in) transition from this point until July,” said county 911 Director Paul Nave, who will be the director of the combined facility when it opens.
“It’s not going to be, ‘we all have to get this done in one week,’ ” Nave said.
Nave said that both city and county dispatch centers use the same computer-aided dispatch system but that the city uses a newer version workers in the county center will have to learn.
By January, the city and county dispatcher centers will be linked to where they can receive CAD reports from one another.
For example, Owensboro police and Daviess County sheriff’s deputies use different coding systems for specific crimes, so a new, uniform system will have to be created.
Also, city dispatchers will have to learn how to handle calls for service from rural areas, while employees in the county’s 911 center will learn how to respond to calls inside city limits.
“It’s like taking two different cultures and putting them together,” Nave said. “For it to be cohesive, we have to cross-train for it to be a successful move.”
City dispatchers will train in the county’s center -- and vise versa -- before the combined center begins operation.
“My goal is to have three months of cross-training before the move,” Nave said. Training will begin next spring, he said.
Nave estimates the combined center will receive between 130,000 and 140,000 emergency and nonemergency calls for service annually.
The general plan is for some staff members to take calls and route them to specific dispatchers who will dispatch either inside the city or in the county. But the plans, at this point, are subject to change.
“It’s going to be a work in progress,” Nave said.
Both dispatch centers will be staffed up to the day operations switch to OPD.
“Once we have the cut-over date, we’ll staff (the county center) four hours” to make sure calls for service from the county are being received by the combined center, Nave said. “We’ll have testing to confirm that ... we’ll do testing out in the county to make sure 911 calls are begin routed over there.”
The combined operation will maintain the working arrangement city and county dispatch services now have with Yellow Ambulance.
When 911 dispatchers receive calls for an ambulance, they take the basic information and relay the call to Yellow Ambulance -- where more detailed information is taken from the caller. If needed, 911 dispatchers will send first responders to the scene ahead of the ambulance, Nave said.
The county’s dispatch center in the Daviess County Courthouse will remain operational and will be used as a backup if the dispatch office at OPD is knocked off-line, Nave said.
If OPD’s site is rendered inoperable “we’ll be able to route calls to (the courthouse) and be able to function with minimal down time,” Nave said.
The sheriff’s department will have staff members in the county center, so the dispatch equipment will be ready for immediate use in an emergency, Nave said.
Copyright 2009 Messenger-Inquirer