Town seeks 911 dispatch answers

Longboat Key receives approximately 600 police-related 911 calls in a year, but those calls come at a cost: A Sept. 30 report on Manatee County’s plan to shift to the Next Generation 911 system estimates the cost of each emergency call the department will receive through Manatee County over a projected five-year period at $67.87 each.

The next highest average cost per call is $8.52, for Palmetto police.

The town is in its due diligence period as it considers an offer the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office made in February 2013 to take over the town’s dispatch services. But before the town responds to the call, it needs answers from both Sarasota and Manatee counties — including potential costs and savings.

Longboat Key Police Chief Pete Cumming said the town has questioned the figures in Manatee County’s report and cannot address them because he does not know how the county arrived at them.

The town’s options for 911 dispatch seemed clear until Sept. 30. That’s when Manatee County announced it would implement a new Next Gen 911 system that can support technologies such as texting, video messaging, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and telematics.

If the town maintains its existing service, it will have to overhaul its equipment to accept additional data for an undetermined cost, and it’s unclear whether Manatee County would shoulder costs.

“We’re at a place now where we haven’t made any progress forward,” Cumming said. “We’re crunching our numbers and trying to see what benefits us. Nobody seems to know what the hard, solid numbers are.”

Paul Alexander, Manatee County director of information technology, who prepared the report, said that the town’s projected five-year average cost per call is high because the department maintains the same equipment as larger call centers but only receives just a fraction of the 911 calls a larger center would handle.

“Longboat Key gets 600 calls a year, so it comes up high because you have to maintain the same equipment,” he said.

Holmes Beach receives approximately the same number of police 911 calls each year, and those calls are handled by the same number of dispatchers — five in each municipality. But the costs for software, including a VESTA system, which Holmes Beach does not have, drives town costs up.

“Holmes Beach doesn’t have any equipment,” Alexander said. “It’s essentially just the equivalent of a telephone line.”

Manatee County dispatchers currently answer 911 calls placed from Longboat Key landlines, along with cellphone calls that ping to Manatee County cellular towers. A Sarasota County dispatcher answers cellphone calls if they ping to a cellular tower in Sarasota County.

If the call is police-related, it’s forwarded to a town dispatcher; if it’s a fire rescue call, a Manatee County dispatcher handles it. If the town accepts Sarasota County’s offer, the county would dispatch both fire rescue and police calls.

Manatee County has not offered to take over the town’s dispatch services, but unanswered questions surrounding its upgrades, including costs, have the town on hold.

“The uncertainties around the Manatee County system are probably what are really defining our inability to move forward at this point,” Town Manager Dave Bullock told the Longboat Key Town Commission at its Nov. 12 regular workshop.

“Three or four months ago, the options we thought we had were pretty clear: Consider the county offer to consolidate or keep what we have,” Bullock said. “With Manatee County’s change, what you have, we’re not clear on that right now.”

Alexander said the county has met with its vendors and police chiefs in each municipality to determine how the conversion will work and hopes more details will be available in the next month.

“In order to answer these questions, you have to figure out what you’re building and how it’s going to work,” Alexander said.

Whatever decision the commission makes, the department will face a huge conversion that, once implemented, will be difficult to undo.

“Either way we go, we have a lot of questions, and these are decisions that will affect either the service or the budget,” Cumming said.