Ashland city officials tour county dispatch center

ASHLAND – Ashland City officials visited the county’s 911 dispatch center Tuesday in an effort to determine whether to leave the Wooster-Ashland Regional Council of Governments and bring the city’s dispatching services back to Ashland County.

Five members of city council were joined by the mayor and the police and fire chiefs, as well as all three county commissioners. The tour came more than three months after many of the same people toured the WARCOG dispatch center and began discussing whether to make the switch. 

The group first heard from Sheriff E. Wayne Risner and several of his dispatch center staff members before touring the communications center and asking questions.

“I don’t have a dispatch issue,” Risner said. “I’ve got a very good dispatch center down here that operates and functions very well. We have little to no issues with any agencies we dispatch for out in the county.”

The sheriff said he feels the city should never have left its arrangement with the county and started its own dispatching council of governments with Wooster.  

“I’ll tell anybody here I think what happened was wrong,” Risner said. “I think the reasons it happened were wrong, and like I said, I don’t have any dispatch problems.”

Risner said he believes calls being transferred from the county 911 to WARCOG causes delays and confusion in potentially life-threatening situations. 

Additionally, he said, the city’s move to WARCOG has created poor communication between the police department and the sheriff’s office. 

“We all have to work together,” he said. “These folks that live in the city are county residents.”

Risner also pointed out that county residents benefit from having the communications center in their community because they can walk into the justice center and talk with dispatchers, ask to speak to an officer or request a public record. 

The sheriff acknowledged the technology in his center is dated, but county commissioners said they expect to have the technology in the dispatch center and jail fully upgraded to a new Zuercher Technologies system by the end of 2019. 

Mayor Matt Miller asked what it would take to make the Zuercher system compatible with the Sundance program used by the city police and fire departments. County 911 coordinator William Bragg responded by saying it would require a patch that may slow down the system slightly and may reduce some of the features available to the city’s agencies. 

If the city does choose to return to the county’s dispatch center, officials would have to decide whether to purchase Zuercher equipment for officer’s cars or to keep the Sundance system and use the patch to make the systems compatible. The city made a significant investment in the Sundance system when it moved to WARCOG afew years ago, Miller said. 

Risner emphasized his dispatchers have policies and procedures that they are required to learn and follow. Copies of policy binders were distributed to city and county officials to review prior to the tour. 

Some law enforcement officers and first responders critical of the county’s dispatch center cited a lack of policies and procedures as cause for concern, and former city leaders cited a lack of city input into dispatch center policy as a reason for leaving to start WARCOG. 

Miller said some of those concerns are being discussed privately between city and county leaders. 

“In some of the offline discussions we’ve had with the county commissioners and with the sheriff, all seem to be open to coming up with some way to be able to guarantee that the city has real input into how the 911 system is operated here at the county dispatch,” Miller said. “Obviously, that has been a concern of our chiefs and has been for a long time.”

The commissioners indicated a desire to cooperate with that type of arrangement, and the sheriff said he intends to sit down with representatives of the city to discuss how city agencies would like him to handle their dispatching services. 

After the tour, the mayor and city council members were careful to say they had not yet reached a decision.

They did indicate a reluctance to proceed with a proposed meeting with Wayne County and Wooster officials to consider creating a larger regional council of governments to bring the two counties in and replace WARCOG. 

“I think it is hard for us to be open to creating yet another council of governments, a new one, to take care of the situation,” Miller said. “I think for us the decision is, ‘Do we want to be with WARCOG or do we want to be here in Ashland at the county dispatch?'”

All three county commissioners expressed a desire to avoid ending up in a large regional council of governments, and Commissioner Denny Bittle went as far as to say a meeting would be a waste of time. 

“I see no reason or no way that we will go over there,” he said. “I think it would be a waste of my time to go over there, because I think for the safety of this community that we can’t do that to them. They pay us to run this county.”

Council members and the mayor all said they will consider the safety of residents and officers as well as the costs of each option in their final decision. 

“We all clearly understand that we have been elected to serve the people in the city of Ashland and Ashland County, so the decision we will make will be what is best for the citizens of Ashland and Ashland County,” Miller said.