Department of Emergency Communications reports 1st-year milestones, calls and staffing challenges
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Summary
The Department of Emergency Communications marked its first year with expanded technology, onboarding of priority dispatch, CALEA accreditation kickoff, progress on universal call taker cross-training and staffing shifts; DEC leaders said call-answer standards have been met despite vacancies and pledged additional QA and IT investments.
Department of Emergency Communications director Tully Buero and project manager Rick Malsch presented a year-in-review at the Fire and Police Commission’s Feb. 19 meeting, detailing operations, staffing and technology milestones for 2025.
Buero said DEC received 757,000 total calls in 2025, of which 73% were emergency calls. The department celebrated one-year completion of the February cutover to a consolidated DEC and the onboarding of Priority Dispatch, a vendor that supports emergency-dispatch products. DEC also started the CALEA accreditation process in August, a multiyear effort to align policies and operations with national standards.
Staffing and training were central themes. The DEC hired roughly 10 new emergency communications officers in an August class, promoted 67 personnel, and implemented a universal call taker (UCT) model to cross-train staff to handle both police and fire/medical calls. Buero said the UCT phase 1 is complete but the department is still working to get more staff through certification; roughly half of call takers are trained as UCTs. The department reported an abandoned-call rate in the 2% range—below the industry 5% threshold that often signals understaffing.
Leaders also described technology improvements and future projects: implementation of Telestaff (scheduling tool), rollout of Comms Coach (an AI-assisted QA and call-simulation tool), plans for text-to-911, automatic abandoned-call callback features, migration to an ESInet digital platform (moving from copper to digital), and a plan to build an in-house information-services and technology team to support applications and data work. Buero said the DEC will add database and application-administrator positions this year to support near-real-time QA reporting and analytics.
On metrics, Buero said changes to how calls were counted after consolidation explain apparent dips in year-to-year totals; moving to a single CAD removed prior double counting when calls transferred between systems. He said the DEC exceeded national standards for call-answer time and is now focused on end-to-end processing metrics (dispatch time and time-to-arrival) as next priorities.
What’s next: DEC staff said they will continue training and policy consolidation in 2026, pursue accreditation steps, expand QA using Comms Coach, and present follow-up reports on specific performance metrics to the commission.
