In the coming weeks and months, the city of Spokane will negotiate with the Spokane Regional Emergency Communications (SREC) board to have the Spokane Police Department join the regional 911 dispatch center.
The move follows a somewhat tense meeting of the SREC board last week, where the members responded to an Aug. 24 letter from Mayor Lisa Brown and agreed to form a transition committee to hammer out the details.
SREC (pronounced "shrek") currently takes 911 calls and provides dispatch as the "primary public safety answering point" for all of the other 21 fire and law enforcement agencies in the county aside from the Spokane Police Department.
The Spokane Fire Department joined the regional dispatch center in 2022 amid a staffing crisis that left the city department without enough dispatchers to handle its own calls. But over the last five-plus years, the Spokane Police Department has been the lone holdout, continuing to provide its own dispatch services from a building shared with SREC's dispatchers near Spokane Community College.
The city's continued half-in, half-out relationship has been frustrating for those who work in public safety and for elected officials. More than half of the calls for fire or law enforcement originate inside city limits.
So, in mid-April, the SREC board sent the city an ultimatum, giving Brown one month to decide: Is the city in or out? Should the city opt out, the SREC board requested that Spokane resume handling dispatch for the Spokane Fire Department on its own by January.
Brown requested a three-month extension, during which the city paid a consultant to answer lingering questions about SREC's finances, governance and service. With that consultant's report in hand, Brown sent the board a letter on Saturday, Aug. 24, stating that the city would like to fully commit to the regional system, so long as a few remaining differences can be worked out.
"I would like to move forward with a regional [public safety answering point] for both of the City's public safety agencies if we can satisfactorily address the critical recommendations outlined in the report," the mayor's letter states.
At a SREC board meeting on Aug. 29, board Chair Cody Rohrbach, who is also the fire chief for Spokane County Fire District 3, said he thinks there are more points of agreement than disagreement, and he anticipated remaining issues could be worked out by a transition committee.
"We always look to say, 'What's the greatest good for the community? And is this good for all of us?'" Rohrbach said.
GOVERNANCE
One of the main points of contention has been about how many seats the city has on SREC's board.Currently, the city is represented on the board by Deputy City Administrator Maggie Yates and Spokane Fire Assistant Chief Tom Williams. Seven other board members represent various EMS, fire, and law enforcement agencies, and small cities, plus there's one nonvoting citizen member. All votes require a 5/7 majority to pass.
The city hired ADCOMM Engineering, a public safety consultant that has also conducted work for SREC, to look at the city's relationship with the dispatch center over the last three months.
ADCOMM's report, which was included as an attachment with Brown's Aug. 24 letter, states that the city makes up more than 42% of the county's population as of 2020, and should share more power on the board.
"Given the City of Spokane's significant population and service demand, it would be beneficial to enhance its representation on the SREC Governing Board," ADCOMM's SREC Analysis Report states. "This could involve increasing the number of seats allocated to the city or providing additional voting weight to its representatives."
At last week's board meeting, Rohrbach and others acknowledged that when SREC was created in 2018, the original plan was for the city of Spokane to have three seats, including one for the fire chief, one for the police chief and one for the city administrator.
The SREC board agreed to recommend that the Spokane County Board of County Commissioners, who oversee the structure of the public development authority, add a seat for the Spokane police chief.
That would bring the city's representation to 30% voting power, but it's unclear whether that would be enough for the city to agree to fully bring Spokane Police Department on board.
ADCOMM's report pointed to another weighted voting option that's used by King County, which requires that decisions must be approved by both at least 40% of the board members present at a meeting and members representing 60% of the call volume in the county. Essentially, members who represent larger populations receive a larger weight to their vote.
"Ultimately I think it's the county commissioners that we need to and want to be engaged with on governance issues," Brown tells the Inlander. "Governance is not just about control. It's really about policy review and having the city really able to fully participate in the policy and the service quality of the organization."
She also says there's plenty of time to sit down and have those conversations.
"I believe there was somewhat of an artificial sense of urgency created by the original one-month deadline that was given to my administration," Brown says. "The situation of having our fire integrated and police not has been ... the case throughout the last administration, and I don't believe any such ultimatums were delivered."
However, SREC Executive Director Lori Markham says the deadline was necessary after five years of uncertainty, as the center intends to build a new facility and needs to know how large that should be.
"From our perspective, we have some pretty large projects on our horizon," Markham says. "We are in the process of needing to move out of our current facility and move towards a new, larger facility to meet the current needs, but also our future needs."
If the city's in, that facility will need more staff, Markham says. Already, 104 people work in dispatch or reports there.
The future facility has played a large role in another point of contention: finances.
FINANCE
The city-requested ADCOMM report notes that both at the city of Spokane and at SREC, there's "a significant and pervasive focus on financial matters at all levels of each organization."
"This concern is particularly evident in how staff are preoccupied with either SREC receiving its fair share of funding from its member agencies and/or the member agencies concerned that they are being overcharged for services," the report states. "This intense focus on financial aspects appears overly emphasized, especially at the operational level, potentially detracting from the core mission of providing efficient and effective emergency communications."
In previous responses to the board, Brown noted that SREC has built up more than $33 million in reserves in just the last four years.
SREC leaders have said those reserves are necessary to fund a new building, which likely will need to be built in a different area. Markham says a previous report found various security risks for the current building off North Rebecca Street, including its proximity to railroad tracks where hazardous materials are transported.
Brown's administration has argued that not only is $33 million plenty to have tucked away for a new facility, there's a question of whether user agencies realize that their required user fees may be adding to reserves.
In her Aug. 24 letter, Brown stated, "The [ADCOMM] report corroborates the City's preliminary finding — which my team and I have repeatedly identified — that SREC's tax revenues alone are sufficient to cover SREC's expenditures. Therefore, as we have consistently maintained, the user fees charged to the City and other jurisdictions are unnecessary and excessive."
However, SREC Chair Rohrbach pointed out that $14 million of those reserves were transferred over from Spokane County at the end of 2021 and early 2022, from various tax sources that previously went to the county government to provide 911 services.
SREC is funded by a countywide 0.1% public safety sales tax (10 cents per $100 purchase), a 911 excise tax that charges Spokane County residents $0.95 per month on their phone bills (landline or mobile), and user fees charged to each member agency based on their call volume.
Markham says that the other $19 million in reserves did not come from user fees, but from the public safety and 911 taxes.
"Those two tax revenues can only be used for certain specific reasons, according to [state law]," Markham says.
Somewhat complicating the financial discussion is the fact that in 2021, state lawmakers required large counties that levy the 911 sales and use tax to create an interlocal agreement to share that revenue. If they didn't come to an agreement within a year, the city or county could seek "equitable apportionment" of that revenue, retroactive to the effective date of the 2021 law.
Spokane and Spokane County have not reached an agreement on how to share the money.
During last week's SREC board meeting, Spokane County CEO Scott Simmons specifically said that "apportionment" element needs to be worked out.
"I do think that there has to be some robust discussions with this board to determine what are our conditions in order for the city to join," Simmons said. "Because I don't think that under any scenario, should this board contemplate bringing the city on when apportionment of the revenue sources continues to be out there [and] without some agreement that says the city will forgo apportionment."
TENSION
Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels told his fellow SREC board members that he didn't think hashing out details in a public meeting was the right move."We're going to have to have some really hard negotiations, where we're all going to have to be unhappy with each other," Nowels said. "We're going to have to really air our grievances with each side, but we shouldn't be doing it here."
Spokane Valley Fire Chief Frank Soto Jr. said he felt "there's one group here playing by the rules and another that's" using the media, noting that while news stations received the city's letter and ADCOMM report on Aug. 24, he didn't receive it until Aug. 26.
"I'm frankly tired of the gamesmanship," Soto said.
Later in the meeting, he also took issue with the city questioning SREC's financial stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
"With all due respect ... continually pointing the finger at us like we are mismanaging our moneys, that we're hoarding money, is ridiculous coming from a city who's $50 million in debt," Soto said. "We have done our due diligence with our moneys here to make sure this facility is here now for everyone and for the future."
Yates, the deputy city administrator, noted that Brown's administration inherited that $50 million deficit and is trying to do everything possible to address it, including examining the costs and benefits of SREC.
Yates moved to have SREC's finance committee look at other methods to fund the dispatch center (such as not charging user fees), but the motion failed to gain support. Other board members said that the finance committee already does that.
The board did, however, agree to create a transition committee, to request that two county commissioners join that team and to draft a formal response to the city.
"At times I feel like we're almost in violent agreement on some of these topics," Rohrbach said. "How do we listen to the various perspectives here and overcome the barrier before us?" ♦
