Dispatch center in need of overhaul

Multi Agency Communications Center board unsure how to cover costly project

GRANT COUNTY — The Multi Agency Communications Center needs a technological facelift. That much is certain. How to pay for it is anybody's guess.

Members of its executive board say the center in charge of receiving emergency calls from law enforcement and emergency service agencies is understaffed and underfunded, and its equipment is getting old. However, the price tag for an overhaul is prohibitive.

"We are getting by with it," Grant County Sheriff Frank De Trolio said of the equipment. "But there are a lot of failures."

The failures, De Trolio said, involve certain parts of the county such as portions of Dodson Road as well as areas near Marlin, where public safety agencies cannot communicate.

In some other locations, communication exists but it is poor at best, he added. Poor placement of towers is a factor, as is the kind of buildings where the equipment is placed.

"We have $250,000 worth of equipment in $50 shacks," he said. "The place is in bad shape."

An engineering firm, AdComm, put the cost of a total overhaul, turning MACC's equipment to state-of-the-art capabilities, at $7 million.

An overhaul, as beneficial as it may be, is still a gamble. With the pace of technology, new equipment slotted to last 15 years may be obsolete in five, De Trolio said.

Another question is where the money to pay for renovations will come from.

One of the options is to ask the users of the center for more money, most of which are already strapped for cash.

Another option is to put on a ballot a request for more sales tax money. A third option would be to look for grants.

"It's all a matter of money," Moses Lake City Manager and current MACC board member Joe Gavinski said. "I don't think it's as bad or as good as it could be."

Gavinski said that most of the equipment MACC has was inherited from the county before its inception. The situation is not much worse than it was before MACC came into being, he added.

"Some uniformed personnel feels MACC is in bad shape," he said. "I don't know if it's as bad as they make it."

Quincy Mayor and former MACC board member Dick Zimbelman presented a different point of view.

"This overhaul is pretty urgent," he said. "We have to start on part of it, because it's going to take several years to get it done."

Around 70 percent of the MACC budget comes from Moses Lake Police and the Grant County Sheriff's Office. Dean Mitchell, chief of the MLPD, said that his department, along with other law enforcement agencies, are trying to come up with the financial means to purchase the needed upgrades.

"We desperately need to upgrade our computers," he said, mentioning money from the Homeland Security Department to Grant County Emergency Services as a possibility.

The MACC board is composed of seven members, only two of whom have a direct involvement with law enforcement: GCSO's De Trolio and Chief Bill Gonzales from the Quincy Police Department. De Trolio has advocated giving law enforcement a bigger voice on the board.

To Gavinski, it would not make a difference who ran the show, if the agency remains underfunded and the costs remain the same.

"Money would still have to be raised," he said.

MACC started out less than a decade ago. Mitchell, a 26-year veteran of the MLPD, says that with MACC some things have improved and some things have not.

On one hand, law enforcement agencies are on the same record system, sharing information. On the other hand, most everything requires a consensus.

"Everything has to be done by committee, we have to do what everybody agrees to do," he said. "Sometimes that's cumbersome."

Pluses and minuses aside, Mitchell said that something has to happen or MACC will linger even further behind technologically, making an overhaul even more expensive than it is now.