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WEST VALLEY CITY — For 28 years, Salt Lake County's two biggest 911 dispatch centers have been unable to "talk" to each other.
"People were dying, ladies and gentlemen. People were dying," said Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder.
On Tuesday, police and fire chiefs and city leaders from across Salt Lake County joined other county and state leaders to announce a groundbreaking plan to switch the entire county to a single 911 dispatch system — a move that had been discussed for decades.
"Lives and money will be saved," said Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams.
Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County leaders have agreed to a $13 million plan to use a computer aided dispatch system produced by Hexagon Safety. Not only will the new software allow emergency dispatchers to talk to all of the valley's 18 police and fire agencies and will allow departments to share information, but it will be able to link text conversations, videos and photos, and it will be better equipped to handle cellphone calls that now account for 80 percent of all 911 calls.
Several leaders at Tuesday's press conference couldn't hide their excitement as the agreement was announced.
Winder called it a "momentous occasion." The difficult struggle getting to this point, he said, had less to do with physical infrastructure and more with political boundaries and the inability of people in the past to come together.
"What has really happened here today is an amazing coming together of a variety of despaired political, operation, human issues. We have been struggling with the need to improve the service delivery to our citizens for 20-plus years. And much of that struggle has been predicated on the inability of individuals to simply work together," the sheriff said.
Scott Freitag, Salt Lake City's director of 911, said an eight-person committee — which consisted of leaders from Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County, West Valley City, West Jordan and other municipalities — first got together 18 months ago to begin working on the current agreement.
"I don't know any of us had full confidence that we would be at this point here today," he said.
There are currently three dispatch centers in Salt Lake County: Salt Lake City's, the Unified Police Department's, and the Valley Emergency Communications Center. The two main computer-aided dispatch systems in Salt Lake County are Versaterm and Spillman.
VECC, which uses Spillman, dispatches for most of the police and fire agencies in the south end of Salt Lake County, including West Valley City, Draper, South Jordan, West Jordan and others. Salt Lake City and Unified police use Versaterm.
Freitag said the decision to leave both behind and use Hexagon was made because it offered the best "total solution" to the county's issues.
Under the current system, approximately 10,000 911 calls each month have to be transferred between dispatch centers because they come from callers outside specific jurisdictions, he said. Valuable seconds and minutes are wasted transferring calls, plus callers become frustrated when they're asked to provide information twice.
"It was unacceptable for all of us to see news accounts of residents not getting emergency help in time where lives were risked and lives were lost," McAdams said.
Furthermore, when a large event happens, such as last month's large fire near 4400 West and 700 South that required more than 100 firefighters from multiple jurisdictions, the different agencies can't "see" each other, Feitag said. Dispatchers, whom he called the "guardian angels" of first responders, need that information.
When the new system is in place, McAdams said, "It won't matter which dispatch center you call."
The new system will take 17 to 18 months to implement. When the day comes to switch to the new system, Winder said it will happen valleywide all at the same time.
Until then, Freitag said installing new hardware for all the different dispatch centers and emergency vehicles will actually be the smallest component of the project. Implementing a new system that will require all police and fire agencies to work together to learn a new "uniform language" will be tougher, Winder said.
"The next phase will be just as complicated," he said. "We'll literally begin to write the rules with how this system has to go. People got really ingrained not only in just their system but in their way of doing business. This offers this opportunity using the new system as a new base."
Now that 911 calls will all go to the same system, Winder and Freitag agreed that the dispatch centers themselves have to become a single entity. There can't be disparities in wages, hiring, management oversight or how each center is funded.
"When you spend $1 for 911, you want it to go to 911. You don't want it to go to something else," Winder said. "The logical thing to do, it just has to happen and it has to happen as quickly as possible, we need to get away from this idea these centers can operate independently in any other format. We have to go to one physical entity."
Freitag added that dispatchers will remain in separate buildings. But once the new system is in place, they will be able to work in any of the three dispatch centers seamlessly. It's a direction that Freitag says they're already headed.
"Right now, Salt Lake City and VECC have been working closely together on implementing the same policies, procedures, practices, so that a dispatcher — once this system is in place — could go to either place," he said.
"Our vision of the future is we have an agency that has one patch."
Contributing: Jed Boal
