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Captain Clark says dispatch handled rising call volumes after May server migration, urges hires
Summary
Captain Clark told the E‑911 Board the dispatch center completed a May 27 server migration that likely prevented a major outage, reported higher call volumes year‑to‑date and in June, and asked the board to plan for two to four additional dispatcher hires for the coming fiscal year.
Captain Clark, who presented the quarterly report to the E‑911 Board of Directors, said the dispatch center completed a countywide server migration on May 27 and that the switchover "went fairly smoothly," likely preventing a major record‑system outage that had occurred in previous years. He told the board the migration included vendor coordination with Harris Radio and Central Square and that IT was on site for the update.
Clark outlined construction and equipment upgrades at the dispatch center, saying construction is slated to finish in late September with a hope to extend some activity into October while staff work in a more cramped temporary operations space. He said upgrades to cabling and data servers are expected to improve reliability.
On staffing, Clark said the center is still actively hiring: there are two current open positions and multiple interviews in progress. He urged additional hires, saying, "What I would love to say is yesterday," and later told the board that a minimum of two hires would help while four would be preferable, with new hires potentially completing training in roughly six months if hired immediately.
Clark gave the board monthly and year‑to‑date call statistics. He reported June calls for service by agency as follows: animal control 153, fire and rescue 741, sheriff's office 4,725, police department 4,793, and 1,359 calls handled directly by E‑911 dispatch, for a June total of 11,771 calls handled by dispatch. For a Jan–to‑present comparison Clark said last year's total was 61,454 and this year's total is 70,324, which he described as about a 14% increase; he also reported June showed roughly a 40% increase versus the same month last year. (The transcript contained a garbled line that read "4040%"; Clark's clarified figures above are reported as he restated them during the meeting.)
Clark also described ongoing records‑management and quality‑assurance work. He said Central Square (RMS/CAD) has about 13 open support tickets that affect multiple agencies and that a third‑party notification add‑on is intermittently failing to deliver notifications. Clark said the NICE recorder is recording radio traffic but mislabeling or miscategorizing some recordings, which has slowed searches; IT and vendors have open tickets to address these problems. He described a notable June call—a road‑rage incident involving a person with a gun—where dispatchers calmed the caller and gathered information before officers responded.
The board discussed staffing priorities and agreed to include hiring requests in the upcoming budget planning. Clark noted the office is emphasizing selective hiring and uses a panel interview plus a short sit‑in experience in dispatch before final selection.
The meeting moved on to closed session after the report. The board did not take any binding personnel actions in public during the report.
