Consolidated Police Dispatch Study to Begin Dec. 6

The towns of Avon, Canton and Simsbury are considering joining dispatch services and a study of that possibility is moving forward.

At its meeting Thursday night, the Avon Town Council gave the go-ahead for a regional dispatch feasibility study to be conducted by consultants hired by Avon. Intertech Associates, a New Jersey-based consulting firm, will examine the possibility of consolidating Avon, Canton and Simsbury police dispatch services to a single site, according to Avon town officials.

Intertech Associates will visit the police departments in the three towns following a kickoff meeting in Avon on Dec. 6 as part of the data collection process for the study, according to Steve Bartha, assistant to the town manager in Avon. The meeting was originally scheduled for early November, Bartha said, but the statewide emergency caused by the October winter storm forced a reschedule.

The $56,000 Intertech is being paid to conduct the study is coming out of a $75,000 grant by the Federal Department of Justice, according to the minutes of a July 7, 2011 Avon Town Council meeting.

“Regionalization is the buzzword here,” Bartha said in regards to the reasoning behind the study. “There’s also the issue that New York City has … between two and four dispatch centers for the entire city. The state of Connecticut has nearly a hundred.”

The study will examine what might be gained by consolidating dispatch services at one location in Connecticut, with Bartha noting that there are models beyond Connecticut that have seen some success with this method.

The study will take into account the police departments of each town, contract language, town budgets, facilities and facility equipment in order to ascertain how a consolidated dispatch system would run and what it would take to implement.

According to Avon Chief of Police Mark Rinaldo, Intertech will also examine the issues of police stations without dispatch on site, prisoner monitoring, economic benefits and community interest and support. The study is expected to be complete within six to eight months.

In preparation for this, the police departments of all three towns have been compiling information for the past month to pass along to Intertech. Figures include the number of police officers in each department, number of dispatchers, population size, and the area in square miles of each town, according to Avon Police spokesperson Lt. Kelly Walsh.

This study is not the first of its kind in Connecticut. Rinaldo said that a firm called CTL Concepts Operations was hired to look at the possibility of consolidating dispatch centers in 1999. The original plan called for consolidating 16 towns in the capital region around one dispatch center, which was eventually broken down further into the regions on the east and west sides of the Connecticut River.

By 2002, the “west group” had shrunk to include only Farmington, Avon and Simsbury. Farmington later left the group to take advantage of state-sponsored incentives unrelated to the dispatch consolidation program. Since then, two other studies have been performed, neither of which panned out. Bartha has said these failures were partially due to unease with “dark stations,” police departments not prepared to greet anybody entering the station due to dispatchers being located in another town.

“Really, what this grant, this project, is designed to do, together with Simsbury and Canton, is to sort of finally, once and for all, ferret out these issues, define them, and really get into the weeds about how this could and should work,” said Avon Town Manager Brandon Robertson.

Walsh said that Intertech Associates has an excellent track record, having performed this study in numerous other counties and areas that were eventually regionalized.

“That’s pretty much why they were selected,” she said. “They have a pretty good history of doing these types of studies. And that’s their goal. They’re going to tell us what’s going to work and why and how.”