The Valley Signal

Health & Safety

Teton County's 911 Dispatch Fix Widens Into a Task Force and Slips to August

Teton County's 911 dispatch committee widened into a public-safety task force on July 1 and pushed its first full meeting to early August.

By Wade Williams · ·

DRIGGS — Five weeks after Teton County commissioners agreed to stand up an advisory committee to rebuild the county's 911 dispatch arrangement with the fire district, they spent much of an hour on July 1 relitigating what the committee is, who belongs on it, and when it should meet. They pushed their first full meeting to early August.

At their May 27 meeting, commissioners agreed at the table to Fire Chief Mike Maltaverne's proposal: form a named advisory committee, give it a monthly schedule, and task it first with drafting a replacement dispatch services agreement before winding down the 2024 contract. The Signal reported that plan at the time, including a first meeting set for early June and a roster that reached beyond the county: the three mayors on rotation, the sheriff, dispatch, the fire district, and Teton Valley Health Care.

The June meeting was smaller than that. County Administrator Billie Siddoway told the board it drew the existing operations committee, plus Chairman Brad Wolfe and a fire commissioner, and centered on "purpose and how to continue." The multi-stakeholder committee that the chief had outlined had not convened.

By July 1, the discussion had widened. At a recent Council of Governments meeting, Siddoway said, the Driggs mayor had raised the possibility of a "public safety task force" keyed more to education than governance, and the board tried to square that wider group with the narrower 911 dispatch committee. "I'm still kind of thinking we're talking about two different groups," Siddoway said.

Advise or govern

Siddoway warned that a body "developing policy or recommending on policy" would fall under open meeting law, and pressed the board to keep its scope narrow. She read Commissioner Ron James as asking for something larger. "It sounds like Commissioner James is looking for a governing body that's taking action and drafting policy and basically running dispatch," she said. "If you're talking about taking away that governance from the sheriff and giving it to another body, that's a big decision."

James pressed a different worry, the pace of the work. "We've been talking for years about what the problem is," he said. "We've taken no action." He returned to it: "Are we going to have another committee that's going to talk about it some more? We're going to do another two years?"

Commissioner Dan Powers agreed. Dispatch "is a county function," he said, and the committee could not be a governing one. "I don't see how that body becomes a governing body. I don't think it makes sense." Wolfe closed the item the same way, recommending the board "move forth with this first meeting the way we had it planned," and adding, "I agree that it is an advisory committee, not a governing agency."

The chief's diagnosis

Maltaverne, who has led Teton County Fire & Rescue for four years, kept pointing to a structural split. "Dispatch is housed in the Sheriff's Office, right? Yet you guys have the funding authority," he told the board. "I think that's a little bit of an intersection right there." Funding was the commissioners' call, he said, but the daily operation of the center was not theirs to see: "You don't really have the visibility of that."

The contract itself was the problem, he said. "The contract that we've had for the last three years is ineffective, has been. Full transparency, ask your clerk, we haven't paid you a penny this year." The nonpayment was deliberate leverage: "Let's terminate the contract and make us pay. We're not even holding up our end because it's null and void... So I'm trying to hold your guys' feet to the fire by not paying you. That's how bad it is." What he wanted was a working replacement, not an exit: "I want to partially fund dispatch, but I have to get something in return."

The money told the same story, he argued. "In the last five years, through a state study I saw, dispatch has turned back to the general fund $983,000, likely due to vacancies. That's my assumption," he said. Nearly $1 million budgeted for the center, he added, had reverted to the general fund unspent.

"I feel like this is Groundhog Day, and I'm out of rabbits. The hat's empty," he said. "I'm so tired of talking about dispatch, and zero has changed. I would say in the four years I've been here, I think it's worse today than it was four years ago." He had run out of patience for process: "I need some people to get together in a room and coordinate on how to make dispatch better, period."

He made a point of separating the dispatchers from his complaint. "I've been in public safety for 36 years. I would not want to sit and answer a phone," he said, thanking the 911 staff on the record. "This is not about them. This is a process and more about, you know, the governance of that center." He asked to go on the record: "None of it's personal. I just, I have a job to do."

What was decided

The board took no vote. The July 1 item, like the May agreement before it, was a discussion. The board's direction was to keep going: the existing operations group will continue to meet, with one county commissioner and one fire commissioner attending, and the board pushed the broader task force out about four weeks, to be scheduled by email toward an early-August target. They set no date.

The deferral comes as the Signal has reported an above-normal wildfire outlook for southern Idaho this summer, the stretch in which 911 dispatch quality matters most for the fire district that answers calls across the valley's wildland-urban interface.

What to watch: Whether the operations group meets as discussed in early July; whether the public-safety task force is scheduled for early August; and whether either body returns with a draft replacement for the 2024 dispatch services agreement, the concrete task the May plan assigned, and the contract Maltaverne wants terminated.

Sources