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Committee moves on dispatch staffing restructure; staff cites call-volume pressures and a donated valve set for hazardous-response team
Summary
County staff recommended restructuring fire/EMS dispatch—promoting a supervisor, adding senior radio operators per shift and three communications officers—with an estimated total cost cited at $195,000 and expected overtime reduction. Staff also recommended accepting donated valves from Piedmont Propane. Committee discussion covered funding, interagency cost-sharing, and call-volume trends; transcript records motions but not roll-call tallies.
Speaker 4 presented a request to restructure the county’s fire/EMS dispatch operations, citing a steep rise in call volume and difficulty covering shifts under the current structure. "Three years ago, we handled about 53, 5,400 calls annually, and this year will be 25,000 with the same staffing," Speaker 4 said (the transcript's numeric phrasing is unclear). To address operational strain, Speaker 4 proposed promoting the main supervisor to manager, assigning a senior radio operator per shift, and adding three communications officers so each shift would have three staff.
Speaker 4 reported the total cost as $195,000 and said overtime currently runs between $60,000 and $75,000 per year; staff said salary savings from vacancies and reductions in overtime should cover most of the new cost and that fund balance could absorb any shortfall. "I had 1 employee that worked 28, 12 hour shifts in a row," Speaker 4 said, describing operational stress on current employees.
Speaker 3 said the county would address city contributions in upcoming STS negotiations, arguing the cities benefit from dispatch services but are not currently paying into the cost. Speaker 1 and Speaker 4 discussed the funding structure and expressed comfort with the county's ability to cover the change going forward. Speaker 1 stated "So moved" after discussion, indicating a motion to approve the staffing changes; the transcript does not include a roll-call vote tally.
On a separate but related item, Speaker 4 reported Piedmont Propane donated valves to the Hazardous Response Team to help flare leaking large horizontal tanks and recommended accepting the donation. The transcript records the recommendation but does not capture an explicit recorded vote accepting the donation in the excerpt.
During staff reports, committee members asked whether the fire-rescue call graph included Gold Cross ambulance calls; Speaker 4 clarified the graph showed fire responses only and that approximately 68% of those responses were medical in nature. The transcript contains some unclear numeric phrasing about past call volumes; those items are quoted cautiously rather than paraphrased as precise counts.
