By Lela Garlington, The Commercial Appeal
Memphis, Tenn. — “Toy towns” and turf issues are preventing Shelby County from having a single emergency dispatch center, a Shelby County 911 Emergency Communications District board member said Thursday.

Suburban cities, board member Henry Brenner complained, “want to continue their turf. I call them the toy towns. They are toying with the lives of citizens.”

With basketball star Lorenzen Wright’s death still fresh on everyone’s mind, the board spent an hour Thursday talking about the difficulties dispatchers face with 9-1-1 wireless calls.

Last month, Germantown dispatchers heard gunfire before a call was disconnected. The call’s length and Germantown’s computer-aided mapping system impeded dispatchers’ ability to pinpoint the caller’s location, other than that it was outside the city. No patrol cars were sent to the general area, and the information from the call wasn’t relayed to Memphis.

Former Shelby County Commissioner Julian Bolton pleaded with the board to lead the charge in a public campaign for consolidating all dispatch centers in the county.

“The obvious flaw is that we don’t have uniform dispatching,” Bolton said. “Having a uniform dispatch center is a best practice which is the norm, which we have deviated from.”

By the time of the 9-1-1 call in question in the early hours of July 19, Bolton said, “(Wright’s) life was already gone.”

But he added, “You can cruise the area. You can see if you’ve got some felons fleeing.”

Brenner said the county commission could have put a single dispatch center in place in 1985, but munici-palities were against such a move.

“It didn’t pass,” Brenner said. “We have, for 16 years, been trying to build a central dispatch center. Bartlett, Collierville, Arlington, Millington – they want to continue their turf.”

State law allows municipalities the right to run their own dispatch centers.

“You can’t force them” to consolidate, said Rex Holloway of the state 9-1-1 board.

Collierville Mayor Stan Joyner, who did not attend the meeting but whose town was the only suburb to send a representative to the meeting Thursday, said it would be difficult for Collierville to sign on now to a consolidated 9-1-1 dispatch center.

“Having made a recent significant investment of $2 million in a 9-1-1 Call Center, it would not be financially prudent for Collierville to ‘unplug’ our system and begin contributing to funding a new countywide system,” Joyner said in a statement.

Also, Joyner said, the town maintains a higher degree of accountability by retaining direct oversight over its own system.

“In the event of a regional disaster, we ensure town resources and staffing will be directed to our citizens,” he said.

The board noted a number of difficulties dispatchers face with 9-1-1 wireless calls:

Cell phone towers “on the border (of cities or counties) is where the real issues come in,” said local 911 district director Raymond Chiozza. For example, a Bartlett call could go to Memphis, so the wireless caller must tell the dispatcher his location.

Suburban cities “don’t want the expense of maintaining” a computer-aided dispatch mapping system that goes beyond their own city limits, Chiozza said.

With hang-up distress calls from cell phones, Chiozza said, a dispatcher could call the carrier for additional information, but each carrier has different requirements and may take an hour or even days before providing the dispatcher with information about the cell phone subscriber or the person’s address.

After discussing the how cities couldn’t be forced to consolidate dispatch centers , Chiozza said the board could create its own call center, “but it makes no sense adding another layer to the system. We would still have to transfer the calls to the other centers for dispatch.”

The board reached no conclusion Thursday on how it should proceed.

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