Police and fire officials in McHenry County are considering a possible consolidation of emergency dispatch services as a way to reap the benefits of the information age while keeping down expenses.
Nine separate radio dispatch services, split geographically, now form the link between citizens in need of help and the county’s police officers, firefighters and paramedics.
Leaders of McHenry County’s 26 police departments and 15 fire districts have begun asking why their communities should pay for nine services when one might do the same job better and for less money.
“We’re trying to be future problem-solvers,” said Keith Nygren, chief of the Crystal Lake police and head of a McHenry County Chiefs of Police Association committee, which is studying consolidation of dispatch services.
“We know the Federal Communications Commission is planning to reallocate all the radio frequencies that police now use. That means that after the year 2000 or 2005, we will have to adopt new technology anyway. So we can’t sit back now and do nothing now,” Nygren said.
But emergency services officials say they aren’t just planning for the future. They believe the consolidation could save money now.
“The nine dispatch services employ 76 people. With consolidated dispatching, we could have 35 dispatchers,” said George Landholt, administrator of the countywide enhanced 911 service.
Nygren, Landholt and other authorities describe police dispatching as a rapidly evolving field.
Not long ago, they said, dispatching meant having an operator who took a telephone call from a citizen in distress and then keyed on the two-way radio to send a police officer or firetruck to the scene.
Then came 911, followed by “enhanced 911,” an improvement that tells dispatchers where a telephone call to 911 is being made from.
McHenry County’s nine dispatch services all have enhanced 911 equipment, which is purchased and maintained by Landholt’s agency, the McHenry County Emergency Telephone System Board.
In addition, computers are commonplace in squad cars.
Some police departments-none of them in McHenry County yet-carry satellite tracking devices that report squad cars’ exact locations to a base station, thus allowing a central computer to select the squad car that’s closest to the scene of the trouble, and to dispatch it there.
Although Nygren and his fellow chiefs in McHenry County are looking for ways to buy that and other technical wizardry, the FCC plans to cram more radio bands into the frequency range now occupied by police, fire and paramedic units.
“The radios we have now can’t make the tuning adjustments necessary to utilize the new frequencies,” Nygren said.
Consequently, a decade or so from now, new radio base stations and mobile units will have to be purchased.
Richard Tuma, head of the 20-year-old DuPage Public Safety Communications, says centralized service has made sense for 12 police and 15 fire departments in DuPage County that belong to it.
“In a small dispatch center, if you have a police pursuit under way, and a citizen telephones in for a paramedic, and somebody else calls for the fire department, it can get pretty hectic,” he said.
However, on a routine day at DuPage Public Safety Communications, there are nine to 12 people on duty at a time, so there’s usually enough dispatchers to handle the load, Tuma said.
Yet centralized dispatching might not appeal to everybody.
James Wales, police chief in Lake in the Hills and immediate past president of the chiefs association, helped get the study of central dispatching under way, but his department pulled out of a cooperative dispatching arrangement with nearby Algonquin in 1988.
