Sheriff voices support for unified 911 desk

A city of Maryville proposal to replace its aging police and fire headquarters sparked a discussion at Friday's Nodaway County Commission meeting with regard to creating a shared dispatch center that would handle 911 calls and other communications for multiple law enforcement and first-responder agencies.

Maryville Public Safety Director Keith Wood said last week that while previous efforts to create a unified communications facility have gone nowhere, the idea still "makes a whole lot of sense."

However, Sheriff Darren White and North District Commissioner Robert Westfall said during the commission's regular Friday session that the city has declined several opportunities over the years to combine dispatch operations under one roof.

White said incorporating a municipal dispatch desk into a new police/fire station makes little sense because the recently built County Administration Center has a large, easily securable area in its basement that was specifically designed to accommodate a unified 911 center.

Mostly underground and constructed of reinforced concrete, White said the space is intended to withstand severe weather and other crisis situations and can be powered using an existing emergency generator.

"Why are we trying to reinvent the wheel?" said White, who added that locating a multi-agency communications facility in the county's governmental center, which stands a few feet from the jail, makes sense administratively.

"The sheriff is the top law enforcement officer in the county, and that includes Maryville," he said. "The Sheriff's Office needs to be driving the bus on this."

White said the current system, in which Maryville Public Safety, the Northwest Missouri State University Police Department and the Sheriff's Office each fund and staff separate dispatch centers breeds inefficiency.

"It's about power, control and money," he said, citing a major structure fire near Ravenwood last week as an example of what he claimed is a sometimes convoluted communications system.

While rural fire departments and a county ambulance crew called to the blaze were dispatched by the county, White said a separate phone call had to be made to Maryville Public Safety dispatch, which then notified city firefighters to answer the alarm.

The result of such situations, White said, is excessive and confusing radio traffic because different dispatchers end up feeding directions and other information to units responding to the same emergency.

North District Commissioner Robert Westfall said he has become frustrated with efforts to work with the city on a shared dispatch facility. He said a task force comprising representatives from Polk Township, Maryville, the university and the county was created about six years ago to address the problem, but that a series of meetings went nowhere.

"After so long of talking about something you get kind of tired of hitting the same roadblocks," said Westfall, who noted that a combined dispatch system appears to be working well in Kirksville, which is both the Adair County seat and home to Truman State University.

The main roadblock keeping combined dispatch from becoming a reality in Nodaway County is money. Dispatch operations are funded through a tax on telephone landlines, and that revenue is drying up as more people switch to cell phones. Missouri remains the only state in the country without a statewide fee or tax for wireless 911 service. Voters have twice defeated ballot measures implementing such a tax, most recently in 2002.