Anyone in Santa Barbara County who calls for emergency fire or medical help receives the quickest response possible from firefighters thanks to the new regional dispatch center. It’s the same story in Santa Maria, and this year, the city’s Fire Department also made changes to improve efficiency.
“You’re getting the closest unit down to the second throughout the city, which I think is fantastic,” Santa Maria Fire Department Battalion Chief Seth Wells said.
Since June, all the county’s fire and medical calls to 911 have filtered to one place. Emergency medical dispatchers answer them at the Regional Fire Communications Center (RFCC) in Santa Barbara.
The calls are still initially taken at places like the Santa Maria Police Department, but they’re immediately transferred to the RFCC.
With this centralized dispatch, the jurisdictional lines that separated cities into districts are gone. Now, the closest firefighters will be sent to the scene, no matter if it’s their district or not. For example, if an engine is closer to a caller by one second, it’ll be the one responding to the scene.
The fire departments in Santa Maria, Lompoc, and Guadalupe are among the seven in the county that transitioned to the regional center, according to the county. The RFCC, a roughly $18 million project, has been up and running for about six months and celebrated a ribbon cutting ceremony on Dec. 9.
Wells, who’s also the RFCC liaison at the Santa Maria Fire Department, has seen the benefits firsthand, but the transition got off to a “rocky start.”
It took the agency time to adjust to the RFCC system, like building new muscle memory, Wells explained. Even hearing new names and voices on the radio took some getting used to.
And then there were changes in the department separate from the regional center.
“One thing we did is we’ve added the truck to all the vehicle accidents in the city,” Wells said, referring to the trucks with big ladders on top. “So, more resources are rolling to help people out, and it’s nice to see.”
In June, the department altered its use of Tablet Command, a mobile incident management software on tablets. Instead of only one-way communication, firefighters are now able to talk back to dispatch. With just a tap, units can communicate if they’re responding or if they’re available for another call.
Firefighters are receiving “an extreme amount of information” in real time on the tablets. Instead of a few lines, they could receive a page full of details, which are constantly updating about the incident they’re responding to. It cuts out some of the radio traffic, too.
“I think what it’s done for our department, [is] it’s really given a lot of autonomy to our captains and to our battalion chiefs to really empower them to make a lot of command-based decisions on their own,” Wells said. “It’s nice to see our captains and battalion chiefs able to make those decisions in the field based on their experience and their knowledge of the city.”
Now that Wells has had months to digest the impacts of all the changes, he likes how the new systems are working. Dispatchers are getting better every day, learning how to navigate Santa Maria and best serve the community.
This article appears in Dec 11 – Dec 18, 2025.