By Adam Pagnucco.
With crime rising and average response time increasing, you might think that the county would want to increase the size of its emergency call center, which handles 911 calls.
If so, you would be wrong. County Executive Marc Elrich’s FY25 recommended budget instead calls for the elimination of 27 Public Safety Emergency Communication Specialist (PSECS) positions. Why? In an appearance before the county council’s Public Safety Committee, administration representatives admitted that they can’t fill them – and they are struggling to fill dozens of other 911 vacancies too.
First, some background. The emergency call center (ECC) has been struggling with staffing issues for years. Back in 2022, the call center had 42 vacancies out of 183 authorized positions, a vacancy rate of 23%. Today, the call center has 66 vacancies out of 198 positions, a vacancy rate of 33%. Council analyst Susan Farag issued a warning about the call center a year ago, writing: “Chronic understaffing has multiple negative impacts on operations including:
- Mandatory overtime;
- Employee morale;
- Combining police radio talk groups for longer hours;
- Longer wait times for 911 and non-emergency lines (there have been multiple complaints from the public); and
- Less supervisory oversight because supervisors fill call taking vacancies.”
These problems are now taking a toll on performance. The county’s police department budgets contain data on average time to answer 911 calls in seconds. The chart below shows this measure from FY09 through FY23.
Aside from a one-year spike in FY17, the county’s average 911 call answer time has generally been 5 seconds or less. In FY23, it was 10 seconds. The state’s emergency telephone system regulations require counties to have “a sufficient number of call takers and equipment to consistently answer incoming calls on a daily average of 10 seconds or less.” Montgomery County is on the verge of violating that standard.
Two years ago, the county added call center positions but could not fill them. Farag writes in her most recent memo, “In FY23, the Council approved 15 new PSECS positions to shift at least seven Firefighters from dispatch back to the field. Due to large vacancy rates at the ECC, these positions have never been filled and uniformed Firefighters remain on site.” Now the county is trying the opposite tack by proposing to eliminate 27 of these positions instead. Why?
At an April 18 meeting of the council’s Public Safety Committee meeting, Council Member Dawn Luedtke asked administration representatives about this issue:
I have questions about the ECC. I don’t’ think it’s any secret that one of our neighboring jurisdictions has had some serious well-documented in the media challenges with 911 service. I don’t want us to be in that position. We also know that we have forced holds for people in order to keep just the bare minimum to get by with and as you mentioned combining channels etcetera and if you look at the chart on page 5, we’re higher volume than we were as you mentioned in 2019 pre-pandemic. And I have concerns about that with the 27. How was the number 27 chosen and where did this come from and how did we get here, if you know?
Council Member Dawn Luedtke.
A county budget analyst representative replied, “So good morning, the 27 ECC positions was chosen based on the length of the vacancy. So all of these positions were vacant for at least one year.”
Luedtke kept up her questioning, prompting Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Earl Stoddard, whose portfolio includes public safety, to offer this elaboration:
I want to make clear, so I don’t know that these are going to be long term losses for the department. What I mean by that is I don’t think we’re going to fill the other positions that are vacant over the course of this fiscal year and I do agree with Ms. Farag’s assessment that we need to right-size this element of our operations long term. And the key here is we’re not going to be able to add these positions this year, we have these other positions that are currently vacant that we’ll be focused on but ultimately we may need to add back some number of these 27 over the coming years once we determine what the right sizing of the elements are. But we just do not believe we’ll be able to get to these 27 in light of the other 30-some/odd positions that are currently vacant with the rate of our recruitment. We’ve seen an uptick and we’ve seen improvements with that but we’re getting 5 or 6 every period – I’ll let Assistant Chief [Darren] Frank potentially speak to that because he talked to me about it – but there’s been an increase, an uptick in the number hired, but just even at the pace over the course of a year we won’t get into these 27 by the end of this fiscal year.
Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Earl Stoddard.
Stoddard later added, “If we see a landslide number of people coming in and we believe that we can get more on board, you will assuredly see a supplemental request to allow us to hire positions.”
I give the administration credit for being honest. They admit that their vacancy problem is so severe that they can’t fill all the 911 positions they would like to fill, so they don’t want to budget for them in an effort to save money. And they are ready and willing to ask for more money to hire when they need it.
But Luedtke is right to look across the border to the District of Columbia, where failures in its 911 call center have drawn a blizzard of press coverage capped by a whistleblower lawsuit from its former interim director. The county executive’s own budget admits that we are at the edge of violating the state standard for 911 call response. Saving money is a good thing, but fully staffing up to save lives is even better. The county council should establish that as the goal to be met, and sooner rather than later.