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Genesee County 911 Consortium

Fenton 911 dispatch is on the line
Council split on $180k upgrade or using Genesee County

by Anna Troppens | Tri-County Times

December 9th, 2010

Fenton — City administrators will see what they can do about Fenton’s 911 dispatch for police, fire and ambulance. The city’s dispatch equipment is aging, and replacing it is a budget problem. If Fenton doesn’t replace it, city officials have discussed switching to Genesee Central for dispatching.

Chief Rick Aro of the Fenton Police Department said the $300,000 cost for equipment can be reduced to $180,000, for the actual equipment. It is used to talk by radio, record phone calls, record radio traffic and switch between radio frequencies.

 To reduce the $300,000 proposal to $180,000, cuts would include furniture made especially for the new equipment, at $30,538, Aro said. In addition, another cut could be $8,000, for grounding the radio tower attached to the police department building. Lastly, video surveillance equipment, at $70,300, could be removed from the proposal.

This would leave $180,000 for the city to fund. The city’s radio equipment is very old and needs replacing, and, according to a federal mandate, people must be able to text, e-mail and send photos to the 911 system. He also said the staff must be able to locate cell phones in the city. New equipment has to be up to these federal standards.

Because of budget problems, Fenton police and fire know it isn’t good timing, but they need some direction on how city officials will proceed, Aro said.

The police department has been reducing its costs and came in under budget last year, he said. “We saved more than $180,000 from our budget last year, $181,000.”

City Manager Lynn Markland said Fenton stands to lose $300,000-$400,000 in property taxes next year. The city has at least seven less employees than it did 2½ years ago.

There are ways Fenton might get grant money, Fire Chief Robert Cairnduff said. But, organizations won’t issue grants to the city if its 911 dispatch won’t be in business in a year or two.

 In addition, discussion took place on possibly obtaining some funding from local big box retail stores, which benefit from shoplifters being placed in the city’s lock-up overnight.

Osborn said Fenton needs to find costs of police staffing if the city doesn’t have dispatchers handling their current tasks. In addition, it needs to find out what fire department costs would be.