Centralized 911 service could speed response times

Under the current system, all EMS and fire departments in the county are dispatched through the Hays County Sheriff's Office. Buda Fire Chief Clay Huckaby said this creates complex problems during house fires in areas such as Kyle.

"You're going to tell [a 911 dispatcher] your house is on fire and they're going to say, 'Please hold,' and they're going to transfer you to Hays County to page out Kyle Fire Department because all the Hays County fire departments are operated from Hays County 911 dispatch," Huckaby said. "So there's a lot of transferring of phone calls and stuff like that."

According to the Buda Fire Department's internal monitoring system, the average response time—which measures the time between when the fire department gets dispatched and when the first responder arrives to the scene—is five minutes and 25 seconds.

Huckaby said that because of all the switching and rerouting of phone calls, there is an additional four- to five-minute delay before his firefighters are dispatched.

Regional collaboration

The idea of co-location originated with the Hays County Commissioners Court a few years ago when Precinct 3 Commissioner Will Conley was asked to bring together emergency service and law enforcement officials to consider what the future of emergency communications would look like in the region.

Conley said the county considered multiple options, including maintaining the current system, in which each public-safety answering point operates independently of others, as well as consolidating all the answering points under a single entity.

The court ultimately decided to create a co-located center in which each agency's dispatchers are housed together but are still employed by each separate jurisdiction.

"[The] Sheriff's Office will be working for the Sheriff's Office, Kyle PD working for Kyle PD, but under one roof, sharing one infrastructure system that would provide a higher level of service from the 911 standpoint than what we have today," Conley said.

Erica Carpenter, communications director for the Hays County Sheriff's Office 911 Dispatch Center, said the county will begin a $174,000 project management study in January to determine the logistics of co-location. The study will be carried out with Mission Critical Partners, a public safety communications consultant firm.

"This is not a study to see if we need to improve service by co-locating," Carpenter said. "That's already been done, and that's already been proven that we do. It's already been agreed upon that co-location is going to benefit our county responders and the citizens, so this study is to show us how, where and how much [it will cost]."

Conley said when the study is concluded in late spring, officials will have an idea of when a co-located center might open.

"This will get us to the point where we could hand over our plan—think of it almost like a business plan—to engineers, architects and contractors. They would have the information that is necessary to give us an appropriate bid and be able to go out and do their work to design and build the facility for us," he said.

When the project began gaining momentum, it was met with some skepticism. During a Kyle City Council meeting in November 2011, Kyle Police Chief Jeff Barnett expressed his concern about co-locating emergency services.

Barnett said some of the dispatchers at the Kyle Police Department have picked up extra duties at the office, and a move from the police headquarters to a centralized dispatch location might force the department to hire more staff.

Officials at Texas State University's emergency dispatch center voiced the same concern, Carpenter said.

"Everybody is on board, and yes, everybody has apprehension, and everybody should have apprehension, because they need to challenge, they need to go in there with the challenge of 'Well, what about this, what about this, what about this?'" Carpenter said. "That way, no component of your operation is left out."

Carpenter said she has had multiple conversations with Barnett and Ralph Meyer, Texas State University police director, and while their concerns have mostly been eased, work is still needed on the final details of how the co-located facility will ultimately operate.

In 2011, Hays County commissioners created a committee of emergency service providers to determine how much the facility would cost. That committee landed on a $3.9 million estimate, which Carpenter said is accounting for the county's projected population growth in the next two decades.

The committees and consultants have looked at the Combined Transportation, Emergency and Communications Center in Austin as a sort of cautionary tale, Carpenter said. When that co-located center was being planned in the early 2000s, officials in Travis County could not foresee the population growth on the horizon, she said.

"We're not just building this for today," she said. "We're building this for 15, 20 years down the line."

Shared dispatch technology

Carpenter said when CTECC officials tried to expand the center, space was so limited there was not even room to run more wire through the building.

"We don't want to have to come back and do this 10 years from now," Carpenter said. "We don't want to have to do this again, so we're going to do this right the first time."

In addition to streamlining the actual dispatch of emergency services to incidents throughout the county, the co-located center will allow each agency to move onto the same computer-aided dispatch system.

"What I found out was that the lack of unity between our agencies is due to the fact that we don't have the platform in place for us to be connected," Carpenter said. "So we don't have common technology, common terminology, common things like that, so that's what was keeping us separated. Now everyone wants to come together and work together."

Right now, each of the four dispatch centers in the county is operating a different CAD system, which means they are essentially blind to each other, Carpenter said.

A shared CAD system will also allow all police in the county to sync their mobile data terminals—the laptops in their cars—so they can see which officers are responding to different emergencies.

"We're doing the job, but we don't have the tools to do the job, and we're suffering for it," Carpenter said. "We're doing the best we can, but we need to get improvements in our communications centers."