ASHLAND – Ashland County Commissioners and Ashland City Council members continued a discussion Tuesday about the possibility of the City of Ashland leaving the Wooster Ashland Regional Council of Governments and rejoining the Ashland County Sheriff’s Office dispatch center.
The county commissioners met at the Ashland City Schools administrative office just before the city council’s regular meeting at the same location.
Board of commissioners president Denny Bittle said the idea behind the change of meeting time and location was to foster cooperation with the city as well as to increase transparency. The meeting was televised on the school district’s public access cable channel.
County and city officials listened to and asked questions of Josh Bowling, account manger for Zuercher Technologies, who described technology upgrades the county is considering for its dispatch center, jail and other operations.
Bittle said the county’s dispatch center is in need of upgrades. Compared to the newer equipment at the WARCOG dispatch center, he said, “It’s very old equipment. Instead of having screens, they have lots of buttons that they have to push to transfer calls… It looks like a 1957 Chevy is what it looks like.”
Bowling said phase one of the proposed upgrades would be a 9-1-1 system update that would cost Ashland County about $107,000. Ashland County would save $45,000 to $50,000 by sharing the system with Wayne County, Bowling said.
In addition to cost savings, joining with Wayne County would create useful redundancy in case of a system outage, Bittle said.
“If our system goes down, we can transfer all of our calls to Wayne County and they will take those calls for us and send them back to our dispatch,” Bittle said. “Same with Wayne County, if they happen to go down, their 9-1-1 calls would come to us and we would dispatch to them.”
Bittle said he expects to meet with the sheriff and then propose this portion of the upgrade for approval at the commissioners’ meeting next Thursday, May 24.
Phase two of the project would cost the county around $300,000 and would include computer-aided dispatch, records management, jail management, civil process and mobile software systems.
The Zuercher figures do not include all necessary costs to complete the project, including costs of workstations and room retrofitting. Bittle said he estimates the total cost for the project to be approximately $800,000.
“Once we have these numbers, we will put together a program and contract and offer it to the city to come back to us, to the Ashland County dispatch,” Bittle told the city council members in attendance at the meeting.
Bittle said he expects to have his proposal for the city ready by mid-June. He said he plans to recommend the county pick up the full cost of the equipment and charge the city a yearly fee for operating expenses only.
“We’ll see if that happens,” commissioner Jim Justice said, indicating the commissioners had not yet made a decision about what they will be asking of the city.
City council president Steve Workman asked the commissioners whether the county had any intention to consider joining WARCOG instead of maintaining and upgrading its own center.
“None at all,” Bittle answered. “We’re not going there.”
Workman then asked Bowling what would be involved if the city wanted to entertain the idea of moving its dispatch services back to Ashland County.
Bowling responded by saying he would have to investigate the city’s needs to determine what the cost and process would look like.
City council member Dan Lawson asked what benefit the city would receive by coming back to Ashland County rather than staying with WARCOG.
Bowling responded by saying such a move would eliminate the step of transferring emergency calls.
“The call handler, the dispatcher, would be able to dispatch city units directly after receiving the call rather than having to transfer it,” he said, adding that the officer or first responder in the field would also receive from the shared system any name or address information related to the call.
Commissioner Mike Welch added that “local tax dollars would stay here in Ashland County, and your operational dollars you would be charged would help us to upgrade the 9-1-1 system that we have.”
Noting that many of the concerns he has heard about dispatching services are not about technology but about training, Lawson asked what degree of training goes along with the Zuercher program.
Bowling said his company offers extensive initial training as well as ongoing training opportunities, but he added that some of the responsibility for training dispatchers falls to individual agencies.
When asked by a Times-Gazette reporter whether they had considered what the cost would be for the county to join WARCOG rather than to spend more money on its own technology upgrades, commissioners said they had not.
“I personally feel that would be a waste of taxpayers money, plus I’m not interested in sending taxpayers money over to Wayne County,” Bittle said. “I think it’s important to keep it local and have local control over it.”
Justice agreed, saying while he was impressed with the equipment WARCOG has, he thinks the county can do better.
“I think the cost would be less than what you pay over there, and I think you’d get better service,” he said.
Workman asked whether commissioners would even have a choice to move 9-1-1 and dispatching services without the sheriff’s consent.
Bittle responded by saying the county can choose to contract out dispatching services but cannot take 9-1-1 services away from the sheriff’s office without the sheriff agreeing to relinquish control of 9-1-1.
