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St. Clair County considers higher municipal dispatch fees as radio maintenance climbs
Summary
County commissioners reviewed a recommendation to rebalance municipal 9-1-1/dispatch fees after rising maintenance costs for the countywide radio system and years of flat percentage increases. Staff warned municipalities to expect a roughly $70,000 aggregate increase under the proposed list.
County commissioners at a St. Clair County work session on items for next Tuesday were briefed on a proposal to update municipal dispatch fees to better reflect each jurisdiction's call volume. The engineer's report, presented during the session, said the county has used uniform percentage increases for years but that method now understates growth in some municipalities and fails to fully cover rising system costs.
The report noted the county's radio maintenance contract is increasing substantially and cited a current maintenance cost of about $245,000 with projections to about $265,000 next year. Commissioner-interjector (speaker 1) said the maintenance contract increases were a key driver of the fee proposal. "It's gonna be $245,000, then the next year is gonna go up to 265,000," he said.
Staff said a committee analyzed total calls from each municipality and drafted a fee schedule designed to allocate costs by share of use; they asked the commission to approve sending the list to cities quickly so municipalities can factor the change into upcoming budgets. Finance-related staff (speaker 11) summarized the proposal's fiscal impact: "The total increase with these fees, it'll be an additional 70,000," the staff member said.
Commissioners agreed to try to place the resolution on Tuesday's meeting agenda so cities would have notice for budget planning, but no formal vote was recorded at the work session. Several commissioners urged clear, timely communication to municipal leaders so they could include the numbers in their FY planning timelines.
The work-session discussion included repeated reminders that the county has subsidized part of dispatch costs in past years and that the proposed schedule seeks to "catch up" costs that were not fully covered when the system was first centralized.
