Bangor council votes to keep city dispatch program

BANGOR – Though it won’t lay the issue to rest indefinitely, city councilors Monday night adopted a resolve in support of retaining the city’s own dispatch program.

The resolve, which notes that the move to a regional dispatch program would not result in significant savings and could result in a downgrade in residents’ and business owners’ fire insurance rates, was passed in a 7-2 vote, with Council Chairman Frank Farrington and Councilors Annie Allen, John Cashwell, Peter D’Errico, Richard Greene, Susan Hawes and Richard Stone voting in favor of keeping the city’s dispatch, and Geoffrey Gratwick and Dan Tremble voting against it.

The resolve’s passage was welcome news to Bangor dispatchers, who have had to live with year-to-year uncertainty about their jobs with the city.

“I’m happy about it,” said Renee Wellman, the city dispatchers’ representative to the Teamsters union. “I think that it’s a positive step for the city,” she said.

“It’s something that the city needs to maintain because it’s an integral part of [Bangor’s] public safety system,” she said, adding, “Bangor handles enough of a call volume to [justify] its own dispatch program.”

City councilors had been debating whether Bangor should join the regional dispatch program since it opened in 1997. Despite a great deal of headway on the details of such a move, city officials still had questions as recently as last month.

While the major impetus behind the regional dispatch talks had been potential savings, it became clear last week that potential savings would be significantly less than the more than $250,000 a year projected earlier.

Though city administrators noted earlier this month that their projections were based on several assumptions, once the costs for additional supervisory, clerical and other costs the city likely would incur were factored in – as well as revenue lost from the city’s fire alarm monitoring program – the cost for maintaining the status quo was pegged at $528,931 and for joining the regional program at $524,689, or $4,242 less.

During Monday’s meeting, Tremble questioned some of city staff’s conclusions and methodology.

“The process, I think, was disingenuous,” he said, adding that the cost figures and projection “don’t pass the straight-face test.”

Gratwick’s reason for voting against the resolve was that it went against the spirit of regionalism the area is working to develop.

“I think that as a region, we need to work together,” he said. Given the area’s lack of wealth, he said, “we certainly can’t waste our resources.”

Cashwell, however, noted that Bangor now funds about a quarter of the county budget but generates about 40 percent of the county’s overall total of emergency calls. If Bangor were to join the county program, he said, Bangor would continue to pay 25 percent of the budget, but the county’s expenses would increase because more dispatchers would have to be hired.

Given that, he said, it wouldn’t have been long before other communities objected. He predicted that a change in the funding mechanism, now based on valuation, would have followed. If the mechanism changed to the proportion of calls, Bangor’s share would see a sharp increase.

“That’s a risk down the road and it’s a political risk,” he said. “I’m not prepared to take that risk.”

Police Chief Don Winslow and Fire Chief Jeff Cammack have recommended against the move, saying it would result in a loss of local control, reduced services, and a downgrade of the city’s rating with the Insurance Services Office, which affects insurance rates for every municipality in the nation. A downgrading of Bangor’s ISO rating could increase property owners’ insurance premiums by as much as 5 percent.

Tremble also said he was disappointed that the council majority chose not to send the issue to a citywide vote. A referendum vote would have bound the decision for three years unless overturned by a subsequent public vote.