WOOSTER – While officials in the city of Ashland and Ashland County have dialed back discussions about the possibility of combining their emergency dispatching services, officials in Wayne County have begun a dialogue about similar plans in their own county.
Officials from Wayne County and the cities of Wooster and Orrville met Monday to begin the talks. The two cities, along with the city of Ashland, make up the Wooster Ashland Regional Council of Governments which has run a combined dispatch center known as WARCOG for the past two years. Both counties run separate dispatching centers.
“This was strictly an informational meeting for us to try and get together and see if there’s a way for us to do this together. It’s not about us running scared from the WARCOG,” Orrville Mayor Dave Handwerk said at Tuesday’s WARCOG meeting. “Ashland, we’re not assuming you’re leaving.
“I don’t want people to think that we’re doing this because you’re leaving. If that happens, it happens down the road.”
Nearly two months ago, city and county officials from Ashland took a tour of WARCOG at the suggestion of Mayor Matt Miller. Following the tour, the Ashland officials began talking about what it would take for the City of Ashland to leave WARCOG and rejoin Ashland County’s dispatch center.
Ashland County announced plans to spend $800,000 to upgrade technology at its dispatch center in hopes of luring the city back, but the county later put those plans on hold.
City council members have not talked publicly about the issue during recent council meetings.
“We’re still in the investigative stage,” council member Dennis Miller, who represents the city on the WARCOG board, said Tuesday. “The next step is to have a trip to the sheriff’s dispatch, because some of us have not seen that yet … I would say right now, we’re a ways away from making any decision.”
Handwerk implied discussions may move slowly or stall on the Wayne County side as well, based on what he heard at Monday’s meeting.
“I think we came away with some things we know (Wayne County is) pretty hard and fast on and some things we’re pretty hard and fast on,” he said. “So unless some of those things get softened up, I don’t know how many more meetings we’ll have. We’re definitely going to schedule one more meeting.”
According to The Wooster Daily Record, the three sticking points for the Wayne County, Wooster and Orrville leaders are governance, location and funding of a a proposed combined dispatch center — mostly governance.
Wooster Mayor Robert Breneman said Tuesday he would like to see not only Wayne County and its cities but also Ashland and Ashland County all pull together to create a larger regional dispatching center.
He explained that the idea for what became WARCOG began about 10 years ago when entities came together and contracted with Cleveland State to study the feasibility of a regional dispatch center.
“The study came back and said, yes, you can,” he said. “They gave us three different scenarios of who was part of it. The best scenario was where they took everybody in Ashland and Ashland County and Wayne County and all the entities in Wayne County and had them all be a partner in this. It truly saved people a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Breneman alluded to the idea that the climate in both Wayne and Ashland counties did not allow for such a large consolidation at that time, but the two cities still proceeded with the creation of WARCOG.
Breneman said he is hopeful that “things have changed a little bit.”
“My belief is that we can all end up working together and have a system that will be great for all our communities,” Breneman said.
Also at Tuesday’s WARCOG meeting, the council approved a tentative agreement with a newly formed collective bargaining unit of dispatchers. The new union contract will not be made public until it is finalized, officials said.
