In Clatsop County, some emergency responders rely on their cellphones to communicate during an emergency — not their radios.
Local officials say this is just one example of how responders have found ways to work around a fractured emergency communications system spread across two separate dispatch centers and in need of upgrades.
Now city and county leaders and fire districts plan to take another stab at a topic past leaders have circled, studied and recommended for decades: consolidating 911 dispatch operations in Seaside and Astoria into a single, countywide organization.
The goal would be to create a more efficient and resilient system and to chart a clear path for critical upgrades to equipment and infrastructure.
This week, Clatsop County Sheriff Matt Phillips and County Manager Don Bohn introduced several consolidation options for county commissioners to consider ahead of a meeting with other stakeholders set for March 12.
Bohn and Phillips see multiple benefits to consolidation. They say it could address duplicated and fragmented infrastructure across the county, make it easier to retain staff and deal with staffing shortages and, importantly, it would increase the reliability and speed of dispatch during emergency situations.
But merging won’t be easy. The two centers have different priorities at different times, Phillips told KMUN.
“Those two independent systems don’t mesh perfectly,” he said. “They work pretty good, but there’s some holes in the program.”
Also, employees are represented by different unions, for example, and equipment and infrastructure ownership is scattered across agencies and departments. Emergency responders and dispatchers are used to working with each other in all kinds of situations and under various conditions, but consolidation could trigger significant changes to routines and habits.
And there is the question of where a combined dispatch center would be located. Phillips told KMUN that stakeholders are already looking at some possibilities.
When it comes to consolidation, officials have identified four options.
Option one is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.
However, the county recently landed just over $1 million in federal funding set to go to upgrading and replacing public safety communications equipment. If consolidation is on the table, Phillips told KMUN those funds can be used in an even more targeted and cohesive way.
The second option: Governmental entities could sign a memorandum of understanding with each other and create a new organization for emergency dispatch. This would come with all the needs of a new, separate organization, though.
The organization, formed under a specific state statute, would also not be able to own its own land, potentially complicating the siting of a combined dispatch center.
With all that in mind, Bohn estimates this option could be more costly than continuing to run two separate dispatch centers.
The third and fourth options involve setting up a district, which opens the door to a key revenue stream: property tax.
One version of this is a service district, which would have its own governing board. Similar to the memorandum of understanding option, it would need to create its own internal functions around things like human resources, for example.
The option Phillips and Bohn tend to favor is to form a county service district. Under this model, the county commissioners would be the district’s governing body and the district would be able to plug into existing county infrastructure overhead.
To create either type of service district, officials would need to go to voters.
And, well before a ballot measure is considered: “All the entities have to be on board and supportive,” Bohn said, adding that the county would not be able to move forward on any kind of consolidation without that support from Astoria and Seaside and the subscribers to 911 dispatch services.
But: “It’s also premised on the fact that if we’re going to do something different, we have to do it in a way that actually moves the needle,” Bohn said.
“Because,” he added, “rearranging what we’re doing, if we can’t really get to funding this at a level that for the next 30 years, the residents (and) the first responders can have confidence in the system, then I would argue probably status quo is as good as we can do.”
The county commissioners were generally supportive of the idea of consolidation, but Commissioner Leanne Thompson had some misgivings.
She wondered about service coverage areas in South County that have long been tricky where emergency communication is concerned and worried about the specific needs of fire districts in that area that might differ from the rest of the system.
Also: “Taxpayers are frustrated and frightened,” she said. “They don’t want to approve more money. On the other hand, this is a bad problem that will only get worse if we continue to put it off.”
For now, consolidation is still just talk, although serious talk.
“What everybody really has to agree to first is that the current approach to providing 911 communications services through two dispatch centers … has some challenges that could be addressed through a different means,” Bohn said. “That’s the first question: Is the problem substantial enough to really entertain other solutions?”
To him, the biggest issue is that “someone’s going to have to pay for what the system needs if the system’s going to be truly resilient and truly functional moving forward.”
And that is going to take additional resources no matter what, beyond the general fund budgets that float the centers now, Bohn told commissioners.
Since the mid-’90s there have been discussions about consolidating the two dispatch centers into a single center. Those discussions ratcheted up in the early 2000s with a state law — soon rescinded — that would have required consolidation. Further discussions followed 2007’s Great Coastal Gale, a massive coastal storm that exposed major vulnerabilities of the system.
There were multiple studies over the years showing the potential benefits of consolidation, and local leaders were on board. But nothing happened.
Going into the early 2020s there were more reports and the two dispatch centers even temporarily merged in 2022 because of staffing shortages at Astoria’s center. This brief combining of the centers further exposed deficiencies in technology and interoperability but, just as important, it showed what consolidation might look like in practice.
“It was a proof of concept,” Phillips told KMUN.
Around the same time stakeholders, including fire and police chiefs, began to develop a governance document and looked at what would be involved if staff from the two existing dispatch centers combined.
Phillips told KMUN he thinks consolidation could move beyond talk this time and become a reality.
“I think there is widespread belief amongst the public safety officials that it is the right thing to do,” he said.