Mesa names Kim Mesa to lead new Public Safety Support department to centralize 911 call‑taking and shared services

The city manager has named Kim Mesa to lead a new Mesa Public Safety Support department that will centralize 9-1-1 call-taking, forensics and shared administrative work while keeping police and fire dispatch operations under their current chains of command, city officials told the Mesa City Council on April 10.

The move is intended to deliver a single intake “one-caller” experience for residents, reduce handoffs between call-takers and dispatchers and consolidate duplicated administrative functions, Scott Butler, the assistant city manager, said. "The city manager has named Kim Mesa to oversee what we have now labeled our Mesa Public Safety Support department," Butler told the council.

Kim Mesa, who has been acting in communications oversight and has directed the city laboratory, described the new department’s mission as supporting the agencies it serves. "The Mesa Public Safety's, support department is just that a a department that's mission is to support the activities of the agencies that we serve," Mesa said in her presentation.

Why it matters: City officials and the consultants they hired found that callers sometimes must repeat information when calls are transferred between police and fire, and dispatchers often carry multiple responsibilities. The new model separates call-taking (the initial, comprehensive gathering of information from a caller) from operational dispatching (sending first responders). Under the plan, a single call-taker will collect and enter incident data,…