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Mayor Christy Cregan highlights dispatch center upgrades and new RIMS system
Summary
Mayor Christy Cregan, speaking at the 2023 State of the City, described her long career as a local dispatcher, outlined how the city dispatch center handles call-taking, dispatch and emergency medical dispatch (EMD), and announced the city went live with a new CAD system, RIMS, on Dec. 14.
Mayor Christy Cregan said the city’s dispatch center — where she spent more than two decades — performs both call-taking and dispatching and recently went live with a new computer-aided dispatch system, RIMS.
“our Dispatch Center is unique in that we call take dispatch and do EMD,” Cregan said, describing a combined call-taking and dispatch model in which staff give emergency medical instructions while sending police, fire and medical units.
Cregan said she has been a dispatcher for “23 years almost” and has served “almost two years as a supervisor,” noting family ties to local schools and community service. She described the center’s responsibilities as handling police, fire and medical calls for the city while also providing fire/medical dispatch services for the county.
“We just got a new CAD system called rims we went live with that December 14th it's a much more widely used CAD system,” she said, adding that RIMS can map incidents, show unit locations in relation to an incident and allow requests for RIMS-trained dispatchers to support the center during large incidents. Cregan cited the Caldor Fire as an example of the type of event where additional mapping and mutual-aid coordination would be valuable.
She also reflected on recent collective stressors, saying the center weathered “a couple of hard years in here with covid Caldor and the fires” but that successful rescues made the work worthwhile: “on the good days where you have good saves it's a good day knowing that we help our officers go home to their families and our firefighters and our Medics go home to their families is a good feeling.”
Cregan closed the remarks with a welcome to the 2023 State of the City. The address highlighted preparations intended to improve response coordination and resilience for future major incidents.
