Santa Barbara County staff presented to the Board of Supervisors four options to help improve emergency dispatch services at its Aug. 28 meeting. It’s been a little more than a year since the supervisors last received an update on the issue.
Currently, the county’s Public Safety Dispatch Center is managed by the Sheriff’s Office, who provides dispatch services for the county’s EMS, Fire Department, and Sheriff. The center also services Guadalupe and several county departments.
There are six other dispatch centers countywide, including in Santa Maria, but at this time, none of the locations have “any real-time electronic connection to another,” according to staff documents.
In July 2017, the board heard a report on the dispatch center by a consultant that analyzed the emergency and nonemergency environment at the location. At that time, two options were proposed: either “optimize” operation at the current facility through improvements and allowing stakeholders in the office to have input into how the center is managed, staffed, and further upgraded; or move the Fire Department and EMS to a new location that would be built adjacent to the department’s headquarters.
That last alternative came with an estimated price tag of $8.6 million for construction, coupled with an annual operational cost of $2.8 million.
The supervisors instructed staff to explore the plan’s viability. They further instructed staff to provide further information on which other agencies or partners would be involved, financial options and funding sources, along with impacts on employees, information technology support issues, and how to potentially maintain and fund the current center instead.
However, after the Thomas Fire in December 2017 and the following Montecito mudflows that claimed nearly two dozen lives, the county decided that investing in a new South County dispatch facility in such close proximity to the existing center may not be the best option.
“It was thought that some of that funding could be better utilized providing a [sic] center in North County,” the staff report says.
The county also pointed to Santa Maria opening a new joint police-fire dispatch center and noted that perhaps an agreement could be worked out to accommodate county agencies and departments. Staff also told the supervisors that the existing South County center could be split into two dispatch centers and expanded.
While the supervisors met after the Sun‘s press time, the four options they considered were: change the governance structure of the current dispatch center to give stakeholders a louder voice in operations; place sheriff deputies and law enforcement dispatch at the new Santa Maria center and move Fire and EMS to the South County location; expand the existing facility; or convert a North County fire station and use it as “secondary answering point.”
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 6, 2018.