Chardon City Council voted unanimously Feb. 9 to close the city’s police dispatch center and consolidate services with the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office dispatch.
Chardon City Council voted unanimously Feb. 9 to close the city’s police dispatch center — the last to operate independently in the county — and consolidate services with the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office dispatch.
City Manager Randy Sharpe laid out the reasons behind the move, which were covered extensively during a Jan. 31 Chardon Safety Committee meeting,
The recommendation comes after research by the committee — on which council members Dave Lelko and Heather Means sit — as well as Sharpe and Chardon Police Chief Scott Niehus. That research showed necessary upgrades to the city’s dispatch equipment could cost up to $1 million and with continuous changes to technology, future maintenance and upgrade costs could continue to balloon.
Sharpe said research included meetings with police chiefs from Chester and Bainbridge townships.
“Both men expressed their belief that disbanding the dispatch operations and going with the (GCSO) was, and continues to be, beneficial for their operations and residents,” he said. “They have not had any significant issues with (GCSO) dispatching for their communities and would do it again.”
The closure of the city’s dispatch center would mean the loss of four full-time and eight part-time employees. Sharpe said an estimate of salaries and benefits for all dispatch positions in 2023 amounts to about $436,000.
The issue is multifactorial and complex, he said.
While consolidation with GCSO will save costs, a new position will likely need to be created at the city to assume some of the duties currently handled by dispatchers, including issuing warrants, copying citations, handling administrative phone calls and managing police records and files.
Sharpe said the city has been unable to secure grant money to upgrade the dispatch center, in large part due to its size. As dispatch centers nationwide move towards consolidation, the city’s dispatch center is too small to qualify for grants for system upgrades.
In 2021, the city applied for a federal Community Project Funding Request to cover the cost of dispatch consoles, the call-taking system and miscellaneous equipment in the center.
“The estimated project cost was $925,000 and the grant request was for 40% of the project or $374,000,” Sharpe said. “The grant request was not successful.”
‘Poor Planning’
Before opening the proposal to discussion among the council, Mayor Chris Grau offered the floor to members of the public.
Dispatcher John Kloski said previous choices by city management led to the decision to fire him and his fellow dispatchers.
“We are angered and hurt, not just by shutting down dispatch, but because of poor management at some level for not preparing or planning for the replacement of equipment, which is the cause of the shut-down,” he said. “It’s our opinion that proper prior planning and budgeting for the required upgrades should have been taking place for many years. These upgrades did not magically show up overnight. The notion of ‘price increases’ should have been predicted and adjusted for.”
Kloski said the need for upgraded equipment was known before the hiring of the three most recent full-time dispatchers.
Hiring them knowing upgrades were needed was a disservice, as they will now be left without a source of income, he said.
One full-time dispatcher was paid 400 hours of overtime in a previous year due to the city’s inability to find part-time staff to cover open shifts, he said, adding the city will argue it’s difficult to get applicants for a part-time dispatch role.
Kloski said that argument is correct because of the low pay offered by the city.
The 400 hours of overtime paid could have been diverted instead to raising part-time wages enough to be competitive and attract dispatchers from other departments, he said.
Lt. Brandon Reed, who supervises the GCSO dispatch division, said his personal preference would be for the city’s dispatch center to stay open.
He added he did not tell Geauga County Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand, who was seated in the first row of the audience, he was planning to speak that night.
“I didn’t know until just a few moments ago that I was going to step up here and say some things,” Reed said, adding the issue is personal for him.
“I am not a law enforcement officer. I am a dispatcher by trade,” he said. “I know what this job is, I know what these people sacrifice. I know what it takes to be good at this job and there’s a very human element to what’s going on with these people, the sacrifices that they have to make.”
Reed said he and Hildenbrand were not there to sway council members and the GCSO is not “begging” to take on dispatch coverage for the city. However, he added, they are prepared to do so.
“I personally wish we could keep Chardon as our backup dispatch center,” Reed said. “I want nothing more than to be able to keep our backup in Geauga County and come up here and work with our colleagues.”
Most 911 calls now come in over cell phones and a majority of those are sent by default to the GCSO due to the layout of cell towers in the area, Sharpe’s report said.
Additionally, it said in 2021 the city received 12,705 incoming calls — about 35 per day — but only about half were calls for service. The total 911 calls handled by the city averaged out to a little over two per day.
Currently, a majority of 911 calls are routed immediately to the appropriate department, such as the Chardon Fire Department or Chardon Police Department — meaning, emergency calls from many residents are already handled successfully by GCSO.
Hildenbrand told the city’s safety committee at their Jan. 31 meeting his office plans to work with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office for backup emergency communications.
“You’re confident you can handle our load that comes in … for (the city’s) emergency services,” council member Dan Meleski asked Hildenbrand Feb. 9.
The offer would not have otherwise been made, Hildenbrand replied.
“I’d just rather hear it tonight and just straight from you,” Meleski said.
“What I told Mr. Lelko was that, you know, we would love to use (Chardon) as a backup, but you’re going to have to upgrade all your equipment to make it work,” Hildenbrand said.
‘An Undue Burden’
Nancy McArthur, a former member of council and previous mayor of the city, spoke in support of the plan, adding she recalls she was the one to initiate a 2012 performance audit, which suggested the cuts. At that time, the Auditor of State’s Ohio Performance Team recommended the city should look into consolidating dispatch operations with the GCSO, Sharpe’s report said.
McArthur said when making decisions, council has to balance the city’s responsibilities to taxpayers who already pay for services used by non-residents who work or visit, but she supports the decision to close the dispatch center.
“I think the numbers are probably pretty solid,” McArthur said. “It’s a very, very difficult thing to have to tell some of the staff that we can’t retain them … But I do want to support the council here tonight. I feel safe in your hands and I think you will make the right decisions.”
The city is already providing other services for non-residents, she said, including a majority of the salary of the school resource officer for Chardon Schools — the largest district in the county — as well as the municipal court, which handles cases from all over the county.
After public comments ended, Means said the city was faced with a decision whether to invest taxpayer dollars into updating the dispatch center when those residents are already paying for dispatch coverage through the county.
Although Chardon dispatch handles multiple issues besides 911 calls, Means said asking for upgrades feels like asking residents to pay for something twice.
“This is a 10- or 20-year decision that we’re making,” she said. “Do we invest this money? Do we ask taxpayers to do this? And so for me, it feels like an undue burden on our taxpayers to ask them to pay for something that they don’t have to spend that money on.”
The decision is incredibly hard, although saying that does not mean anything for those whose jobs are on the line, Means said.
“No one feels good about this, no one’s happy about this,” she said. “This is the situation. We have to make a decision based on what we have right now before us.”
All seven members of city council voted in favor of the closure.
After the meeting, Kloski said the next step is a negotiation of the shutdown between the city and the dispatcher’s collective bargaining unit.
