Stanislaus sheriff moves to negotiate alternative 911 dispatch contract with Ceres after yearslong JPA dispute

The Stanislaus County sheriff’s office said Tuesday it will negotiate with the City of Ceres to move the county’s law-enforcement dispatch operations out of the Stanislaus Regional 911 JPA and onto a Ceres-run public safety answering point, and that it plans to implement an integrated CAD, records and jail-management platform being developed by Oracle.

Sheriff’s Office leadership told the Board of Supervisors that years of unresolved governance, technical and data-access problems at the SR 911 joint‑powers authority prompted the search for a new partner. The board voted to authorize the sheriff to negotiate a police-dispatch services agreement with Ceres and return a contract for final board approval; the motion passed on a 3‑2 vote.

The sheriff’s team said the Oracle platform would combine computer-aided dispatch, records management and jail-management functions in one system and give dispatchers and deputies faster, consolidated access to information the sheriff called vital to officer and public safety. “This presentation has nothing to do with the dispatchers personally or their work performance, but how SR 911’s governance structure has failed to deliver effective and efficient dispatch services,” said Captain Tori Hughes, patrol operations, Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office described several technical and governance faults in the SR 911 arrangement: dispatchers employed under the JPA lack full access to California law-enforcement databases (CLETS), the JPA lacks a participant signature page and explicit roles for boards and committees, it lacks service-level agreements and a dedicated technology committee, and prior procurement steps for the current CAD choice did not follow what the sheriff’s office regards as a proper request-for-proposal process. “Without these guidelines, there is no clear leadership structure or decision-making authority,” Hughes said.

Lieutenant Brock Condit, who supervises community resource deputies and other field units, told the board that fragmentation among multiple older systems costs time and can reduce officer safety. “This means constantly switching windows, being logged out per time limitations, having to remember and store a large number of usernames and passwords,” Condit said.

Oracle representatives described the company’s public-safety suite as a single, unified platform and said multiple agencies around the country are live or piloting the product. “Oracle is the 2nd largest software company in the world,” said Steve Leone of Oracle. He added that the product is built as a single-provider, integrated stack intended to reduce duplicate data entry and produce real‑time insights.

Sheriff’s office witnesses and private consultants showed a December field test in which Oracle’s software was used to answer 911 calls, dispatch deputies and transfer information into a jail-management module; the sheriff’s office said the test used real incidents in the City of Ceres. The sheriff’s team presented estimated one‑time transition costs of roughly $1.3 million and an ongoing annual cost estimate the sheriff’s office summarized as functionally comparable to current SR 911 costs when accounting for typical vacancy rates. The sheriff’s office also presented a 10‑year financial scenario in which adopting the Oracle partnership would reduce county costs by roughly $11.6 million compared with buying separate CAD, RMS and JMS products from different vendors, figures the sheriff called estimates for planning discussion.

County Chief Executive Office staff told the board they had asked the sheriff’s office for the presentation material in advance but were given it only at the meeting and said they noted what they called “inaccuracies” in the historical account of SR 911. The county CEO said the city manager for Ceres had not vetted the cost slides and suggested Ceres’ internal estimates for first-year total costs could be materially higher than those shown at the board table. “The agenda item in your board packet was prepared by the sheriff’s office and did not contain the report that you received today,” the County CEO said during the meeting.

SR 911 Executive Director Casey Young said SR 911 staff had been invited to demonstrations and remained committed to serving the public: “SR 911 will remain committed to serving the community to the best of our abilities,” Young said.

Public testimony included multiple law-enforcement officers who urged the board to approve the sheriff’s plan, and multiple SR 911 dispatchers and the SR 911 union president who said they were concerned about usability and speed in early Oracle builds. Daniel Phillips, SR 911 union president, said an early Oracle CAD test at SR 911 performed poorly for call entry speed and that dispatchers feared delays could endanger officers and the public. Oracle and the sheriff’s team countered that the product used in those early tests was not fully configured for SR 911 and that Oracle has since addressed many user concerns during iterative development and field tests.

After questions and extended public comment, the board did not accept the sheriff’s full plan to “establish an alternate dispatch system” but did vote to authorize the sheriff to negotiate a police dispatch agreement with Ceres and return a final contract for board approval. The board also asked staff to present a separate briefing on call-transfer and dispatch response times at a forthcoming meeting so supervisors — and affected contract cities and unincorporated-area residents — could assess the operational impact of a PSAP transition.

What’s next: the sheriff’s office will negotiate contract terms with Ceres, the city will review and vet costs and infrastructure requirements, and the board will receive a final contract for approval before any operational change. The board directed staff to return with a technical briefing on call transfers and response times at an upcoming meeting so the supervisors, and the public, can review those measurements before a final contract decision.