By Susan Redden
sredden@joplinglobe.com
By midyear, the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department will start its own dispatching operation, Sheriff Archie Dunn said Thursday.
Dunn said he decided on his own operation, rather than staying with the Jasper County Emergency Services Board or accepting an offer from Joplin, “because I wanted to be able to control the information from the dispatch center and make sure my officers were getting all the information they needed.”
Dunn said he did not believe that would happen if the department maintained a contract with the county dispatching agency.
“And we appreciated Joplin’s offer, but we didn’t think we could work out the logistics,” he said.
Dunn noted that the action will re-establish a sheriff’s dispatching center that had existed until 2004, when the department contracted with the county operation. Police departments in Webb City, Carthage, Carl Junction and Joplin also handle their own dispatching, he said.
Joplin and the Sheriff’s Department have different radios, but Dunn said his system will include a patch to ensure communication with Joplin.
“That’s a big deal for us and part of the reason we offered to dispatch for them, because we wanted to make sure we would be able to communicate,” said Lane Roberts, Joplin police chief.
The county system was an affordable option in 2004, after the Sheriff’s Department had taken a budget cut. With the passage in 2005 of a countywide quarter-cent sales tax for law enforcement, Dunn said, the department can afford to establish its own system. It will be housed in department headquarters on County Road 180, between Joplin and Carthage.
Officials will open bids March 30 on dispatching equipment and furnishings. Dunn said the computer-based dispatch system will be integrated with the department’s reporting system to provide more information to deputies in the field.
“So if an officer goes to an address, information in the system will come up on any previous calls there,” he said. “They need all the information that’s available before they get to the scene.”
The department budget calls for spending $169,000 on dispatching equipment, and Dunn said he expects to employ 10 workers for the program.
“That’s where we’re going to start,” he said. “We won’t know until we get going whether that’s too many people, or not enough.”
The county center still will take 911 calls for the Sheriff’s Department and transfer them, as it does for other law enforcement agencies. When the contract ends, the sheriff will no longer pay the contract fee of just over $110,000 annually that now goes to the county board.
Dunn previously had said that he could not work with Richard Nordell, the executive director of the county’s 911 operation who was fired by the board in early February. Nordell has said he will seek reinstatement via court order.
The end of the contract won’t translate to a financial loss for the county’s Emergency Services Board, said Kelly Stephens, chairman of the board and chief deputy in the Sheriff’s Department.
He said personnel costs for dispatchers hired to handle sheriff’s calls exceeded the money paid by the department by about $60,000.
He said there will be staff cuts when sheriff’s dispatching ends, but he expects they can be handled by attrition rather than layoffs.
The county operation will lose another “customer” when the Joplin communications center takes over full-time dispatching for the Duquesne Police Department. The decision was made because of the strength of Joplin’s radio system, and because the two departments share boundaries and provide backup service to each other, according to Duquesne police Chief Tommy Kitch.
With the departure of the two agencies, the county board will be dispatching for 11 fire departments, two ambulance services and six law enforcement agencies.
Meeting delayed
The Jasper County Emergency Services Board was to meet Thursday and planned to go into closed session to review applications for the post of executive director, which has been vacant since early February when Richard Nordell was fired. The meeting was postponed until next Wednesday after members discovered that the agenda did not include a notice for a closed session.
