Leelanau may be able to reduce costs.

A new federal grant of $1.3 million may help northern Michigan counties with financially strapped 9-1-1 dispatch centers join forces with neighboring counties to establish regional emergency dispatch centers.

Emergency services coordinators and 9-1-1 directors throughout Michigan are currently struggling with a new funding arrangement enacted by the state legislature late last year that ties funding for 9-1-1 to a telephone surcharge on both land lines and cell phones.

A previous surcharge included only land lines. But in the past few years, the number of 9-1-1 calls from cell phones began surpassing those from land lines – even though cell phone users weren’t paying any fee for 9-1-1 service.

Questions about when and if legislation enacting the new surcharge would be signed into law in 2006 led the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners to seek approval of an extra one-mill tax levy – about half of which has been used to underwrite operations of the county’s 9-1-1 Dispatch Center. The extra-voted property tax has been reduced to .6 mill, and expires at the end of this year.

The Leelanau County Board of Commissioners last month considered enacting the new telephone surcharge to support 9-1-1 in Leelanau County, but declined to do so. Commissioners said they felt that a state-imposed formula that would have required a $3.64 monthly surcharge per phone line to completely fund the 9-1-1 center in Leelanau County was excessive.

The lack of a phone surcharge for Leelanau County led the board to consider whether it should extend a portion of the millage to fund 9-1-1 next year or take other steps to support the dispatch center, including dipping into the county’s general fund or lobbying for better state legislation.

One other option appears to be collaboration with neighboring counties.
When he spoke with county commissioners about the options last month, Leelanau County Emergency Management director Tom Skowronski said he did not feel it was his responsibility to lobby the state legislature or make new political arrangements with neighboring counties. Just one day after that discussion, however, a Regional Homeland Security Planning Board for northern Michigan announced that $1.3 million in grant funding was being made available to help counties work toward the goal of setting up regional 9-1-1 dispatch centers.

“I think there’s a lot of potential with this initiative,” Skowronski told the Enterprise this week. “It’s exactly the type of initiative we should be looking into, and we would be remiss if we did not explore it fully.”

The director of Grand Traverse County’s 9-1-1 Dispatch Center, Jamel Anderson, agreed.

Anderson noted that she and others in the 9-1-1 field had worked hard with state officials and legislators to come up with a new telephone surcharge arrangement to fund dispatch centers, but expressed frustration that the legislation finally enacted in December 2007 was “flawed.” She said the Grand Traverse County 9-1-1 Center would be facing significant fiscal challenges in the coming year, and added that she is a strong proponent of working more closely with neighboring counties to provide 9-1-1 service.

“The challenge of regionalizing 9-1-1 centers is five percent technology and logistics – and 95-percent politics,” Anderson said.

“Although the project to explore regionalization in our area is very preliminary right now,” she said, “I’m encouraged that the grant funding to explore the possibilties has come forward and we’ll be able to make some progress in that direction.”

Unlike Leelanau County, Grand Traverse County’s 9-1-1 Dispatch Center operates separately from the county’s Emergency Management Department. In Leelanau County, Skowronski is both the Emergency Management Department head and the director of the 9-1-1 Dispatch Center.

Anderson said the annual budget for the Grand Traverse 9-1-1 Dispatch Center is nearly $1.5 million compared to the $900,000 budgeted for Leelanau’s 9-1-1 Center and Emergency Management department combined. She said that a 58-cent per-phone line surcharge imposed as a result of the recent legislation will bring in less than $500,000 to fund 9-1-1 – about one-third of the Grand Traverse 9-1-1 Dispatch Center’s budget.

“That means our County Board has to make up the difference from the county’s general fund,” Anderson said, “and that’s becoming increasingly hard to do.”

Unlike Leelanau County, Anderson said, Grand Traverse County’s equipment is not “state-of-the-art” and will require significant capital upgrades in the short term. She also pointed out that “state-of-the-art” in the telecommunications business changes continually.

“For example, people think they ought to be able to send a text message via cell phone to 9-1-1 because text messaging is already commonplace in the private sector,” Anderson said. “But it’s going to be a while before any of us in 9-1-1 will be able to accommodate text messaging very well.”

Dispatch Center directors in other neighboring counties also expressed frustration with the new telephone surcharge funding arrangment, and indicated they are seeking new ways to fund their 9-1-1 Centers.

In Antrim County, the sheriff’s department runs the 9-1-1 Dispatch Center, which is also separate from the Emergency Management department. Center director Sgt. Steve Bratschi said the operational budget for Antrim’s 9-1-1 center this year is $622,499.

A $1.97 per phone line surcharge in Antrim will bring in an estimated $491.610 this year, Bratschi said.

“But we don’t really know yet exactly how much it will bring in,” he added. “No matter what happens, I expect that Antrim County will need to dip into its general fund to cover our expenses,” Bratschi said.

In Benzie County, meanwhile, a $2.13 phone surcharge is expected to bring in $371,268 this year to support Benzie’s 9-1-1 Dispatch Center.

Benize County administrator Charles Clarke said the annual operational budget for Benzie’s 9-1-1 Center this year has been estimated at $553,000. He said an additional $105,000 comes from other sources, and that Benzie may need to draw an additional $65,000 from its general fund to pay for 9-1-1.

“Like Leelanau, we’re also looking at some millage initiatives at this point just to keep our 9-1-1 Center in operation,” Clarke said.