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Assembly committee backs drafting to make 9-1-1 a borough department and sunset advisory board
Summary
The mayor and 9-1-1 manager Tammy Goja Cockrell presented Ordinance 2026-12 to formally recognize the borough's 9-1-1 center as a department and to sunset the Emergency Communications Advisory Board; Cockrell said the advisory board has been dormant at times and the center now serves roughly 19'1 users.
The mayor presented Ordinance 2026-12 to establish the Department of Public Safety Communications and to sunset the Emergency Communications Advisory Board. Tammy Goja Cockrell, who introduced herself as the manager of the borough 9-1-1 center and said her current title is emergency communications coordinator, explained the request is intended to reflect the center's existing function and reporting and to modernize its governance.
Cockrell said the advisory board was created in the 1980s to guide early 9-1-1 system development but has been dormant at times and no longer reliably serves as a productive forum. She said the center now supports roughly 19 to 20 users and that stakeholder communication and agreement mechanisms exist to surface operational or cost-sharing concerns without a standing advisory board.
Committee members asked whether sunsetting the board would remove channels for advice and whether the change had a fiscal note. The mayor and Cockrell said advisory functions would continue through municipal agreements and that the reorganization is designed to be cost neutral, though salary and organizational adjustments could be reconsidered in the future. No final vote or fiscal note was recorded in the committee transcript.
