When you dial 911, who picks up on the other end will depend on where and what you’re calling from.
For many in the central peninsula, the person who picks it up is a dispatcher at the Soldotna Public Safety Communications Center (SPSCC) in Soldotna. For others, that dispatcher may be more local.
That SPSCC has been jointly run by the Kenai Peninsula Borough and the State of Alaska for decades, but a new agreement that went into effect last month phased out state employees. Now, the center is run entirely by borough employees and the fees municipalities pay for services are being restructured.
That restructuring process isn’t sitting right with the City of Soldotna, however. As part of the previous agreement, the city paid $150,000 for dispatch services. Under the new model proposed by the borough, which includes a written agreement outlining those services, the city would pay $487,668 per year. That’s according to a memo provided to the Soldotna City Council by Soldotna City Manager Stephanie Queen, in which she described how the center operates and generates revenue.
“We continue to believe that the particular fee allocation method adopted by the Borough does not provide for equity among all user agencies, and we have offered specific recommendations on alternative ways of attributing center costs to the agencies that utilize its resources,” Queen wrote in the memo.
As a middle ground, Queen told the city council during their Aug. 11 meeting that they reached a tentative one-year agreement, through which the city would pay $350,000 for services this year — about 133% more than last year — but this year only. The city arrived at the figure, Queen said, because it’s the amount council approved for services in the budget they passed earlier this year.
Soldotna City Council member Dave Carey said that Soldotna taxpayers should not be subsidizing dispatch services for the rest of the borough and that the amount the city pays in fees should more closely align with the proportion of borough residents Soldotna residents account for.
“What I see with this is an example of overreach by big government saying that they can do whatever they want to the cities,” Carey said. “In truth, they have provided very good service most of the time, but we should not pay more than the percent of the service that we receive. And I find it very offensive that they would make this huge increase … without substantially showing how they are going to provide that … increase in services.”
Some peninsula cities provide their own dispatch services, such as Kenai, Seward and Homer, but still rely on the center for services. After verifying where a 911 call is coming from, SPSCC dispatchers transfer calls to local dispatchers, who then coordinate emergency services responses in that city.
That’s in addition to dispatch services the center provides for other public safety and emergency response agencies on the peninsula like the Alaska State Troopers, Central Emergency Services and the Soldotna Police Department, which all pay additional fees to the borough for those services.
The agreement as restructured now has Soldotna exploring other options, including taking the city’s business elsewhere.
“At this point I think that our conversations with the borough are not likely to yield dramatically different results,” Queen said during the council’s Aug. 11 meeting.
Queen floated the idea of reaching out to the City of Kenai to see if they’d be interested in partnering to offer dispatch services to the Soldotna Police Department as part of a new inter-governmental agreement.
“We have a good working relationship with the City of Kenai, and our municipalities have demonstrated recent success in collaborating for inter‐governmental delivery of services … to the benefit of our residents,” Queen wrote.
Depending on how receptive Kenai is to the idea, Queen said, she and Soldotna Police Chief Peter Mlynarik would work to determine whether the partnership would be feasible. That could include an assessment of financial consideration, governance framework and interoperability.
In a letter to Kenai City Manager Paul Ostrander, Queen reiterated the city’s request.
“(The borough has) recently implemented significant changes at the SPSCC, and this transition provides a great opportunity for the City of Soldotna to re‐assess our own approach,” Queen wrote Ostrander.
Ostrander told the Kenai City Council at the council’s Aug. 18 meeting discussions are still preliminary but that, under a contract with the City of Soldotna, Kenai would provide the location and equipment for joint dispatch services.
“The way I envision this happening is that the contract would be based on the population of the two cities and they would pay the percentage of police dispatch services based on that population,” Ostrander told the council.
Kenai City Council member Teea Winger, who attended the Aug. 18 meeting remotely, said that the two cities already partner to offer some services, such as animal control and that there should be a limit to how often Kenai and Soldotna partner to offer services.
“I do have concerns on taking over more services from the City of Soldotna in partnership,” Winger said. “As stated, we’re doing animal control and now dispatch, next it will be water and sewer. I just feel like there’s got to be a line on partnership(s) … if this is saving them money, there definitely should be an equal share on the upkeep.”
Ostrander said that any agreement reached would require that the city hire additional dispatch personnel. Currently, the City of Kenai does not have two dispatchers working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“If we look at this and, in the end, administration determines that it’s not in the best interests of the City of Kenai, we certainly would not recommend that council consider it,” Ostrander said. “The only way we would bring it back is if it is in the best interest of the City of Kenai.”
Like other municipalities on the peninsula, however, Ostrander noted that some 911 calls made in Kenai are already being directed toward Soldotna. 911 calls made from cellphones go directly to the SPSCC, while 911 calls made from landlines go to Kenai’s emergency services dispatch center.
Regardless of whether the City of Kenai decides to provide services for Soldotna, Ostrander said incorporating technology that would allow 911 calls made from cellphones in the City of Kenai to go directly to local dispatchers is a priority.
“Currently, our residents are experiencing a 15-second to 30-second delay on all their 911 calls because they’re all routed through Soldotna,” Ostrander said.
The council’s greenlight of discussion between the two entities means Kenai and Soldotna will begin work to determine the feasibility of a partnership.
According to a June 4 memo to the Kenai Peninsula Borough assembly, the borough hired an outside firm to conduct a “time study” of SPSCC operations to identify time that the center spent providing services for each agency served.
“Based upon that study the finance department allocated costs incurred for each agency,” the June 4 memo says. “The mayor’s office sent letters to each agency in January 2021 advising them of the upcoming change and the amount each agency would be charged.”
The borough was unable to provide the results of the time study as of Friday.
Reach reporter Ashlyn O’Hara at ashlyn.ohara@peninsulaclarion.com.
