In the five years Pat Walsh has been police chief in Lompoc, he’s hired 16 people to supplement the city’s understaffed emergency dispatch center. Not a single one works there today.
It’s problem he says isn’t new for the Central Coast city.
“Before I started here, one chief told me that at one point he had four people quit in a month,” Walsh told the Sun. “That’s a lot of people to try and replace.”
It’s a trend that’s occured for years, some in the department even say (half-jokingly) it’s a tradition for the dispatch center to be understaffed (it currently has three full-time dispatchers out of the recommended eight).
Lompoc isn’t unique in this matter; even Santa Barbara County has difficulty keeping its center full despite offering higher starting pay, better hours, and a lighter workload.
“It is one of the most difficult and underappreciated jobs in this profession,” Undersheriff Bernard Melekian told the Sun in August 2017. “It’s difficult to hire people.”
And after years of staff attrition that’s resembled a revolving door, coupled with high demand of calls for service that are only going to increase in volume and frequency, Lompoc’s top law enforcement officer declared in recent weeks that he’d had enough.
At a Lompoc City Council meeting on Sept. 18, Walsh argued to council members that all dispatch work should be contracted out, either with Santa Barbara County or Santa Maria.
The move, which is supported by the Lompoc Fire Department, could potentially cost the city more than it would normally spend for its current dispatch center, even if it were fully staffed, but Walsh said it’s a fair price for providing public safety.
“The first person you talk to you when you’re in need of a community member is a dispatcher,” he added.
At the moment, only the Sheriff’s Office has responded with an estimate for how much it would cost Lompoc to contract out its dispatch services: $953,757 for the first year; and $988,200 for the second. Currently the city is set to pay a little more than $1 million for 2017-18, with a roughly $30,000 increase in costs the following year.
The city operates under a biennial budget that provides funding for the dispatch center separately from the Police Department. The Fire Department supplements about half the annual cost for services, while the utilities fund covers around $45,000 each year.
And even though these numbers initially suggest Lompoc is turning to a cheaper alternative, Walsh told the Sun the switch was likely to cost the city more money each year, at least initially.
“Both of the agencies we’re talking to, they pay their dispatchers more,” he explained, adding that the cost would likely decrease over time once the city phased out managing its own facility. “We don’t own the infrastructure anymore if we’re using someone else’s dispatch center, and that’s one more thing we don’t have to pay for.”
Meanwhile, the Santa Maria Police Department boasts a brand new, state-of-the-art facility as part of its Central Regional Interoperability Communication System. The communication center’s staff of 21–including 15 dispatchers–processes more than 100,000 calls for service annually.
Earlier this year, city officials held a technology summit touting a 700 megahertz radio system for its emergency responders. They said the frequency cleared “blind spots” for law enforcement, firefighters, and EMT personnel throughout the city.
“We’d go into the Santa Maria Town Center Mall and we’d lose coverage,” Santa Maria Police Sgt. Alfredo Ruiz explained at the event. “Officers would go into the mall to take a report and they couldn’t communicate with our dispatch center. After getting our new radio system, the penetration into these buildings, it’s phenomenal.”
Public Information Officer Mark van de Kamp told the Sun that the city “wanted to leverage advances in next-generation technologies to improve operations and make Santa Maria safe and smart.”
Santa Maria has some of the highest paid dispatchers in the area. On average, starting pay for the lowest tier of dispatchers in the city is more than $65,000. Employees can climb up to five different pay levels, with the maximum ending just shy of $80,000.
The city finances the salary of at least one of its dispatchers with Measure U funds. The measure passed in June 2012, and created five years of revenue off a quarter-cent transaction and use tax.
The Sheriff’s Office, meanwhile, starts its dispatchers off at around $58,000 annually and tops out at almost $71,991. Currently, 29 dispatchers work for the sheriff and handle roughly 800 calls for service a day (or 292,000 per year).
Lompoc dispatchers’ starting pay is $21,049, with a maximum or “top step” salary of $27,043. It’s a stark comparison to the other two dispatch centers, which feature considerable more support staff to handle calls. At the moment Lompoc has three full-time dispatchers who receive additional support from patrol officers and whoever else is available on duty.
Police Chief Walsh said the low wages, workload, and minimal support made it hard for the Central Coast city to compete with neighboring entities like Santa Maria and the county.
“A fully trained competent dispatcher is highly sought after by other centers because everybody has a hard time filling that high-stress industry role,” he added. “It takes a certain personality to do it.”
Whether Lompoc opts to contract out with Santa Maria or the county remains to be seen, and the decision may largely lie with how the county moves forward with its own dispatch problems.
The $5 million annual cost for the county’s center in the past has been shared by the Fire Department and EMS. The two agencies shared the center under the sheriff’s lead authority, a sticking point for fire and EMS, who for more than a decade argued that the sheriff gave them little say in how the dispatch headquarters was run.
On Aug. 28, simmering tensions flared into a boil as the Board of Supervisors voted to split fire and emergency medical services from law enforcement dispatch.
“Maybe because of my background in counseling, I want to mediate,” 2nd District Supervisor Janet Wolf said that day, following the board’s 4-1 vote. The lone dissenter, Wolf called the situation “an unfortunate turn of events.”
The supervisors are expected to hear from staff at the end of November about where the money to build a new center would come from for EMS and fire. County officials say they have not ruled out also contracting with Santa Maria.
Walsh told the Sun it would not surprise him if the county and Lompoc both ended up using Santa Maria’s state-of-the-art facility.
“Geographically it makes more sense to go with the sheriff, but technology-wise, Santa Maria probably has the most sophisticated, highest quality dispatch equipment on the West Coast,” he said. “I mean, their dispatch center is phenomenal.”
Staff Writer Spencer Cole can be reached at scole@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 4-11, 2018.