Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout05-02-19 Correspondence - A. Surratt to J. Doar - Gallatin County 9-1-1 Deficiencies BOZ E MAN MT City Management May 2, 2019 Jim Doar Gallatin County Administrator 311 W. Main Street Bozeman, MT 59715 Dear Jim: I received your April 24, 2019 letter via email. The press contacted me for a response before I had the opportunity to read it. I was in Leadership Montana training in Billings and was unable, due to the requirements of the course, to respond to you or to the press with that type of immediacy. It is my understanding labor groups may speak on matters of public concern independently and do so without interference from City administration. I believe it important, however, to listen to and consider the viewpoints of public employees as they are the ones most impacted by management decisions. take their concerns seriously. Impacts to Public Safety. While I do not speak for the police association and firefighters union, I speak for the City of Bozeman and will describe to you the impacts to public safety previously identified deficiencies in the County 9-1-1 center have on County residents who live and work in, and visit the City of Bozeman. While we have tried to work with the 911 leadership and you to address those impacts, we feel our questions and concerns have largely been ignored and routinely dismissed. According to County Commission Resolution 2007-067 "it is the desire of the Gallatin County Commissioners to provide the highest quality of dispatch and records services, to promote interagency collaboration, to protect the public in the most efficient manner, and to operate the 9-1-1 Communication Services efficiently and economically. . .". The resolution creates the 911 Advisory Board to "provide guidance on technical issues, research and deliberate trends within the 9-1-1 Communications field, discuss and consider stakeholder viewpoint, and offer advice and recommendations concerning service improvements." Since their respective appointments, Police Chief Steve Crawford and Fire Chief Josh Waldo have actively participated in the 911 Advisory Board, which, according to Res. 2007-067, is the appropriate forum to address service concerns and provide recommendations and stakeholder viewpoints. In fact, City representatives have actively participated since the creation of the 911 Advisory Board in 2007. Over the last 18 months however, both of the City's Chiefs have reported service deficiencies to you and the interim director at Advisory Board meetings, through email, and written correspondence. While the County has made some improvements, service to the City's police and fire departments and P.O. Box 1230 N TDD: 406-582-2301 THE MOST LIVABLE PLACE. BOZ E MAN MT City Management City residents continues to not meet expectations. Recent examples of problems brought to the County's attention include, but are not limited to: • On April 1, 2019 at 10:48:31, 911 received a call for cardiac/respiratory arrest (CFS19-029910). There was an 11-minute fire unit dispatch delay due to a non-functioning alerting system. The policy in place for not receiving an acknowledgement from the fire department was to send another notification out over the same non-functioning alerting system. Chief Waldo brought this issue to the attention of the Interim 911 Director and was assured this policy would be updated. Then the same thing happened again two weeks later. • On April 18, 2019 at 00:07, 911 received a call for a Lifeline Alarm (CFS19-036124). Failures in the paging/alerting system resulted in no dispatch of Bozeman Fire units to the scene. The remedy was again to alert the fire department over the same non-functioning paging system. As Chief Waldo indicated at the time of the April 1'Y event, there are alternative methods for communicating with the Bozeman Fire Department upon failure of the paging system. Failures in the alerting system is not a new issue for the 911 Center and has negatively impacted all county fire agencies for years. • Call processing time for the Bozeman Fire Department for the "go live" period, October 24, 2018 through today is 2:19. This is more than double nationally accepted standards and results in delays to the emergency response. Fire dispatch call processing time for 90th percentile for call processing is 3:56. 1 understand the call processing time has improved in the last 30 days and the City appreciates the County's effort to make improvements. We encourage the County to continue its efforts in call processing time especially in terms of consistency. • For Bozeman Police, a degradation in levels of service both in Dispatch and in Records resulting from unilateral decisions made by the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office (GCSO) have impacted service delivery to the Police Department and community. For example, I understand that due to dispatcher unavailability the County has directed all users of the County's 911 system to "self-dispatch" to existing events when possible. In addition, there are also times when on duty officers have had to either create their own events, including unknown risk events such as traffic stops. There have also been times, due to dispatcher unavailability, that officers have had to answer the radio for other officers and document the location of the event and/or perform the duties a dispatcher would normally perform during the event. • Substandard staffing levels in the center have negatively impacted the availability of dispatchers to respond to officers' radio transmissions which directly impacts responder safety and ultimately citizen safety. I ask Gallatin County more proactively engage the City's emergency response agencies in a collaborative and meaningful way. On several occasions when serious issues have occurred, the County has cancelled the next 911 Advisory Board meeting where the issues could have been discussed in a timely manner. In fact, the County sought to cancel four of the last six Advisory Board meetings (November 2018 - April 2019), and instructed 911 staff to not attend the February 2019 meeting even when a quorum of the Advisory Board could attend. Oxo , ao TDD: 406-582-2301 THE MOST LIVABLE PLACE. BOZ E MAN MT City Management Standards and Performance Benchmarks. The County's 911 Strategic Plan prepared by Reinke and Associates in 2016, identifies two nationally recognized standards for 911 call processing times. The 911 Strategic Plan evaluated the 911 Centers performance for call processing times for Fire and EMS emergencies using the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) standards as follows: for the highest priority responses such as a cardiac arrest, the County's Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) only met the 90% standard 64% of the time and the 99% standard 78% of the time. The 90% standard was not met until the 2.5 minute mark. It took more than three minutes to eventually meet the 99% standard. We believe for the benefit of emergency responders and the community the 911 Center's performance must improve and urge the County to formally adopt standards for call processing times. The Strategic Plan goes on to recommend the adoption of a "better metric" - the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1221 - as a "far more meaningful metric for measuring overall PSAP performance." Indeed, even the County's 911 CAD Administrator's 2018 Year-End Report evaluates the 911 Center's "Time to Dispatch" performance using the NFPA 1221 Standard. I am concerned that if the County 911 Center has no call processing standard then responders, City and County governing bodies, and the general public may not be able to demonstrate how the 911 Center is performing to the best of its abilities, or even providing services at a level commensurate with best standards of practice. 800 MHz Radio System. The City appreciates the joint effort with Gallatin County to purchase and install the 800 MHz radio system. As we understand it, the County used state 911 funds to purchase the system backbone and the City of Bozeman contributed general fund tax dollars to purchase subscriber units for the police and fire departments. As you know, this system utilizing trunked radio technology was proposed by the County to address radio frequency interference and signal propagation problems that negatively impacted police and fire radio communications. The system has performed as expected and, from its inception, was designed to be expanded to include other public safety agencies including the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office. Phase 1 of the 800 MHz project included a trunked radio site installed at the Kenyon water tank. As you know, trunked radio systems work much the same as cellular phone systems and use multiple transmitter sites to improve coverage and provide redundancy. Unfortunately, in Gallatin County we have one site for this system, which unacceptably represents a single point of failure. Phase II of the project was anticipated by Gallatin County and the City of Bozeman to provide an additional transmitter site on High Flat to provide expanded coverage and critical redundancy. The project was reviewed and unanimously approved by the Advisory Board at the November 2017 meeting. To implement the project, the City and County partnered on a grant application submitted by the GCSO to Montana Disaster and Emergency Services State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) to fund the Phase II project. In the grant application, the County wrote: 1 ' ,: ! / �.,=I 1.• 1 • ® 406-582-2344 C,..A TDD: 406-582-2301 THE MOST LIVABLE PLACE. BOZEMANMT City Management "The High Flat 800 MHZ project will address a critical communications issue in Gallatin County. The High Flat radio site is currently a VHF trunked radio site location. The documented interference to the VHF spectrum is so great that this site has only 3 working channels that marginally perform. The lack of capacity and working frequencies has caused us to prohibit Bozeman PD radio traffic from being broadcast on this site. If a Sheriff's deputy or Bozeman Fire trucked radio is affiliated to the High Flat site they will NOT hear Bozeman PD traffic. In addition, the capacity limitation only allows for two concurrent conversations among the more than half dozen agencies using the site. This project addresses these issues by converting the three channel, High Flat VHF trunked radio site into an eight channel 800 MHz trunked radio site. This project was ranked the most important application from all agencies in Gallatin County due to the immediate interoperability issues. This project will not only resolve operational communication issues but provide for increased performance, reliability, and capacity forALL users of the trunked system." Additionally, the grant application goes on to state: "Currently, the users of this site are experiencing a high volume of capacity "bonks" which delays the user's ability to get into the system and transmit. Dispatch was even "bonked" and couldn't transmit to law enforcement in Bozeman which resulted in the need to restrict Bozeman PD traffic from this site. We have a current situation in which mission critical voice and interoperability between Sheriff's Deputies, Montana State Highway Patrol Troopers, and Bozeman PD Officers is severely inhibited or not available at all. This project will resolve these communications issues and improve operational communications for all public safety agencies that pass through the Bozeman area between 1-90 and Hwy. 191 into the canyon. It will also provide capacity for additional agencies who wish to use the system or who are asked to use the system in response to a major event. This site will also provide coverage and capacity for MSU campus activities and interoperability with MSU campus police." Gallatin County 911 and partner agencies worked hard to put this application together and the Bozeman Police and Fire Departments, among others provided letters of support. The Gallatin County All Hazards/All Discipline group voted to make this the County's highest priority and the GCSO was the applicant indicating broad support for the project. The County 911 Center worked hard to specify equipment and support this project with a solid budget and plan for installation. The grant application was submitted under the Fiscal Year 2018 State Homeland Security Program and was approved for $314,676.49. We are now nearing FY20 and the project designed to address these critical public and responder safety concerns has yet to be started. 0121 North Rouse Avenue P.O. :. Bozeman, MT 59771-1230 TDD: 406-582-2301 THE MOST LIVABLE PLACE. BOZE MAN MT City Management Without much input from the users of this system, the County has apparently chosen to take a different approach than what was described in the funded grant application. For months, the City has asked to see this new plan and for months the Interim Director of 911 and you have promised to share a new RFP that describes a new approach to address Phase 11. Neither the process nor the new plan was shared with the Advisory Board or users of the 800MHz system during its development. Then on April 25th you summoned responders to a meeting at the County Courthouse to unveil a confidential 90-page RFP. From the City's perspective, this process has not been transparent or collaborative. The users of the very system the County is designing in this RFP were not involved in its creation. This does not seem like a productive way to achieve buy-in and good results. Emergency Medical Dispatch. The Bozeman Police and Fire Departments routinely respond to medical emergencies occurring in the city limits. Seconds can mean the difference between favorable and unfavorable patient outcomes. According to the County 911 CAD Administrator 2018 Year-End Report, the Center uses the ProQA emergency medical dispatch system. This system is designed to properly classify medical emergencies to effectively dispatch the right resources to the scene. As important is the pre-arrival medical information the dispatcher can give callers on scene. This system requires regular review and assessment of dispatcher performance, and according to that report, the County pays $21,000 annually to have a third party review 25 random ProQA cases per week with the dispatch supervisors grading the same amount or more cases internally. The CAD Administrator goes on to write, "Somewhere in the shuffle of last year's mayhem, this grading has not been done." This is concerning and we want to work with your to correct this deficiency directly impacting some of our most critical life-safety responses. I ask you and your staff join me and City staff in discussing the following issues as I suggested earlier in April. Here is the list of topics we would like to discuss: a. The standards the County uses in the 911 Center and the methods the County 911 Center uses to define quality emergency 911 and dispatch services to County residents and responders. b. Whether Gallatin County and/or the 911 Advisory Board has or will adopt the Gallatin County 911 - 2016 Strategic Plan? If not, what is the guiding document for the County 911 Center's future? c. The proper procedures for the City to advise the County of service level concerns. d. The process and timeline Gallatin County to expand the 800MHz system as discussed above. e. The County's plan to grade more Emergency Fire Dispatch and Emergency Medical Dispatch cases and specifically how the County will ensure "Improving the accuracy of dispatcher for better dispatch" according to the 2018 Year-End Report. � �� -l� _� q - I� \may .11�� I `✓��x �— �A)1��A�l.l��® oY.2,( 11 DaA JK�I'-i; vvv_ VVV TDD: 406-582-2301 THE MOST LIVABLE PLACE. BOZE MAN MT City Management I understand that Gallatin 911 is a County department and decisions related to center management are yours. As an agency that represents the busiest law enforcement and busiest fire agencies dispatched by the Center, the citizens of Bozeman have an interest in the performance of 911 as it directly impacts the safety of our community and its responders. As you know, the City has routinely offered its assistance to improve the service delivery of the 911 system. Please let me know how we can continue to assist to improve our working partnership at the County 911 Center. I look forward to hearing back from you. It is important that we talk about these issues. Sincerely, Andrea Surratt City Manager Cc: City of Bozeman Commissioners Gallatin County Commissioners Fire Chief Josh Waldo Police Chief Steve Crawford Bozeman, MT 59771-1230 TDD: 406-582-2301 THE MOST LIVABLE PLACE.