Town mulls last call for Scarborough dispatch

But fire, police chiefs resist the drive to end the 40-year-old service.

SCARBOROUGH — Scarborough has a choice: It can raise property taxes, or it can cut services.

Town Manager Tom Hall says that’s because the budget from FY 2013 starts short $2 million, based on cuts in state revenue sharing, a shrinking take on excise taxes and, most importantly, the drying up of federal stimulus and jobs bill money which, in recent years, plugged a shortfall in state subsidies.

That’s left town councilors scrambling for ways to lower costs, to keep from having to lower the boom. But, as Hall points out, there are very few places the council can cut and be confident some other resources will be able to cover the resulting reduction in service.

“It’s going to be a very difficult budget year,” said Councilor Judith Roy, who chairs the town finance committee. “It comes down to what kind of service do we want to provide for our citizens.”

About the only option, Hall said, is the town’s emergency dispatch center, which could be farmed out to the county, or as South Portland and Cape Elizabeth have recently done, to Portland. But Fire Chief Mike Thurlow and Police Chief Robert Moulton both resist that notion. Gutting the local dispatch center’s $793,224 annual budget could actually cost the town money, they say.

“We’re not talking about ordering pizza here, this is a serious business that we take very seriously,” said Thurlow, noting that Scarborough formed the state’s first joint center for handling for police, fire and EMS calls in 1972. “This work has become integral to our operations, not a burden.”

According to Roy, the finance committee will take up the issue when it meets next at 8 a.m., Tuesday, Feb. 21. The hope, she said, is to settle question of how much, if any, emergency communication services should be maintained locally before the committee begins to break down the full town budget for FY 2013. Those talks, she said, will begin March 27.

Scarborough is actually slated to lose some of its emergency dispatch duties soon, anyway, thanks to a state-mandated consolidation of Pubic Safety Answering Centers, or 911 call centers.

In 2003, the state cut the number of centers from 48 to 26. In 2009, the state Legislature commissioned a study that called for an additional cut, to 17. Although that hasn’t happened yet, the governor’s office recently submitted a bill to allow just two 911 centers in the state.

The 911 call centers are funded by surcharges to telephone bills. According to Moulton, the state diverted $7.4 million from that fund in recent years to cover general fund shortfalls.  

“After a couple times of that happening, somebody came up with the bright idea that if there was not as much money sitting in that surcharge account, they wouldn’t raid it,” he said. “So, they lowered the fee and that ended up being another $5.5 million in revenue that was never realized.”

The mandated reduction is 911 call centers, said Moulton, is more about shifting dollars than consolidating services to create savings.

“As long as there’s a pot of money out there, the state is going to go after it. If we went to 17 [ceners] tomorrow, that would not be the end of it,” he said. “There’s a pot of money out there and they want it.”

But 911 calls only account for about 15 percent of all the calls fielded by the 10 dispatchers in Scarborough. That means a lot of work the town would have to continue handling, and that means a negligible reduction, if any, to the local budget, Thurlow said. It’s doubtful any positions could be cut at all, he said, because of the coordination that would have to happen between the centers taking the 911 call and the local units.

Even if Scarborough farmed out the remaining 85 percent of its dispatch center work – including all emergency and non-emergency communications – to the Cumberland County Regional Communications Center, it could not write off the entire dispatch budget, Thurlow said. That’s because of so-called “stranded costs,” such as computer, cell phone and mobile data costs for the fire and police departments that are housed in the dispatch budget.

Factoring out those line items leaves $642,393. However, the county dispatch center would charge Scarborough, based on its per capita model, $335,245 to take on all dispatch services, leaving what Thurlow calls a “maximum possible savings” of $307,148. Based on the average home value in Scarborough of $300,000, that maximum savings would result in an annual tax bill savings of $25.80.

“That’s the number we feel we need to start at to see if there are savings by consolidating all of our dispatch services,” said Thurlow.

“And that’s not counting one-time capital costs that would be needed to set up with the county, including database conversion and data lines, or microwave dishes,” cautioned Moulton.

According to Thurlow, that maximum-possible savings also means laying off all dispatchers in town, which also would mean closing the public safety building lobby to the public.

“We feel strongly that just closing the door and not having anybody in that room at all would be such a reduction of services that we really need to look at our options,” said Thurlow.

Those options range from retaining enough trained dispatchers to have at least one person available in the public safety building 24 hours per day (which would end up costing taxpayers $20,167 more than they pay now, when including the payments the town would also be paying to county dispatch), to hiring a pair of receptionists to cover the door during daytime hours (reducing overall savings to $120,749, or $10.15 per average tax bill).

“It really comes down to whether we can still afford the service we provide now, and if the people will tolerate a different level of service,” said Thurlow.

“There needs to be a policy decision as to what level of service we want to provide,” agreed Moulton.