To cut down on duplication of services, the city is laying off three police dispatchers.
The Board of Estimate and Contract Thursday approved eliminating the last three dispatcher positions.
The positions — two full- and one part-time — would have cost the city about $40,000 the rest of this year. The savings for 2013 is estimated at $90,000-$100,000, according to the Mayor’s Office. The cuts will be made on July 14. The dispatchers are Civil Service Employees Association union members, not members of the police union, noted Police Chief Kevin C. Beach.
In his State of the City Address, Mayor Joseph R. Fusco Jr., chair of the Board of Estimate, said the change is being made due to the introduction of the Archonix Records Management System in the department.
The previous system Rome had was provided for free by the state but did not do all the things Rome needed it to do, said Chief Beach. One key factor was that it was not connected to the county’s emergency system, leaving Rome and the county each entering their own data on the same incident.
With the new system, when emergency calls are made to the police department, a patrolman dispatches a police car. A dispatcher from the county 911 Center then takes over the call and enters all data on the incident. Because the two will be connected through Archonix, the Rome patrol car dispatched to the scene will be able to see all data entered by the county.
Rome receives about 2,000 calls a week, of which all but a few hundred are emergency-related.
Archonix was introduced in November and December, but has only been fully functional for about two weeks.
There will no longer be a dispatcher stationed at the communications desk on the first floor of the department’s headquarters in the Justice Building at 301 N. James St., though a patrolman will remain stationed there.
When asked by Common Council President and board member John J. Mazzaferro about whether the cuts will mean a reduction in services for Romans, Chief Beach said: "They will see no change."
"It’s a shame that we have to make these job cuts, but I can’t justify having these jobs here," Beach said today. "It’s about finances, about budgeting." He noted that he told county 911 officials several months ago about Rome’s job cuts and the hope that the Rome dispatchers could get positions there if the county needed to add jobs due to increase call volume.
911 Center Director Kevin Revere is aware of the situation and its anticipated impact of adding even more calls to his operation in Whitestown.
Revere went before a Board of Legislators’ committee Thursday to request that two call taker positions be created to help handle the increased call volume, thanks to the assumption of the New Hartford and Utica 911 dispatching operations in recent years. He also cited the development at the Rome department as one of the reasons he wants to add call takers to supplement his staff of public safety telecommunicators.
Call takers would deal only with non-emergency calls and handle some clerical duties, allowing the telecommunicators to focus more on emergency situation, the director explained.
Revere told the panel that calls to the 911 center are up by about 60,000 in the first six months of this year compared to the same period in 2011. His request for the additional positions was approved.
