California: Dispatchers Settle into Home
ALICIA ROBINSON, STAFF WRITER The Press Enterprise
For Steve Powell, the relocation of Riverside’s public safety dispatch center last month was the fulfillment of a promise made many times over the years, sometimes by people who have since retired.
The communications center handles more than 650,000 emergency calls annually and dispatches the city’s police and firefighters. It moved in late April from the downtown police station to a larger, remodeled space at the Magnolia Avenue station on the west end of Riverside.
The old center was a cramped, windowless 1950s bomb shelter in the police station basement. The new center is spacious and outfitted with new technology and equipment.
“This is a career dream,” said Powell, a police communications systems analyst. “When I started 22 years ago, the bureau manager assured me during my interview process that we were moving any day.”
Powell handles the technological aspects of the center, which include a room full of computer servers and a network of wires under the dispatch facility’s raised floor. A new 911 system automatically routes calls to whichever dispatcher has been free longest, and they hear incoming calls directly in their headsets instead of throughout the room.
At the old center, “All you could hear was the ringing overhead” of the calls, which was distracting and created more stress for dispatchers, said interim public safety communications manager Patty Tambe.
The facility has several small offices for the six supervisors, who previously had to share one desk. The 16 work stations are easily adjustable, so dispatchers who prefer it can work standing up. Video screens on the wall show how many calls are underway and who’s busy.
Public safety dispatcher Diane Howard, who’s worked for the department for 15 years, said the reduced noise and increased space of the new work area have reduced her stress.
The old space “was a dark, dingy, moist, damp building. It was old,” she said.
Aimee Steele, a public safety dispatcher since 1999, likes the improved air flow. “The other one was kind of dark and this one’s kind of airy and open,” she said.
Despite being planned for years, the relocation of the dispatch center didn’t make any real progress until 2010. Police Chief Sergio Diaz said when he joined the department in July of that year, he made it a priority because it was one of the first things he heard about from employees.
Finding the space by moving around some workers at the Magnolia station was the easy part. Funding – about $1.5 million total, Diaz said – was cobbled together from several sources, including former redevelopment dollars and state money to replace the 911 system.
Besides improving working conditions for dispatchers, who are “the first ones to hear the public’s cry for help,” Diaz said, the move ends any uncertainty about the communications center’s future.
The downtown location was in a county-owned building that’s near the end of its useful life, but the city owns the Magnolia station and the new center is “going to serve them for many years,” he said.
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