By JONATHAN YORK
Chief Glenn Whitaker of the Kyle Fire Department was listening to the police scanner when he heard about a wreck in front of Tobias Elementary. He left his office, drove to Tobias, parked and got out.
It was only then that his own pager went off, alerting him to the same wreck.
“I’ve actually timed up to a seven-minute delay,” he said, from when the police are dispatched to an emergency and when firefighters and paramedics are dispatched. “You know, seven minutes is a long time for somebody having a heart attack or somebody’s house on fire.”
He was speaking to city council last month, telling the members that they should go in with the county on its plan for an emergency call center, where dispatchers from across the county would work together under one roof.
After he spoke the police chief got up and told them why it was a bad idea.
Last week the plan went to the public safety committee, where Whitaker, Kyle Police Chief Jeff Barnett and a few other professionals spent an hour on it, which was a significant amount of time when there were five items left to address.
“It’s not that we don’t want to go with the county,” Barnett said. “We have constant communication with our dispatchers.”
He goes into the police dispatch office every day, he said. Sometimes he uses it as a little command center, pointing at a map and saying that he wants a squad car there and there.
“Honestly I don’t think we would save money,” he said, pointing out that some dispatchers have picked up other duties around the office, which someone else would need to do. “We might actually have to increase our staff at the police department.”
Whitaker and another fireman said that a call center would help them stop being the last ones to know.
“We’ve typically been what I’d call the stepkids,” Whitaker said. “With Hays County the dispatchers were traditionally there for the deputies. We were kind of a side issue.”
Under the new plan, he said, “Law enforcement will not be controlling our dispatchers. We will be running our own dispatchers.”
If the call center is built it probably will be in San Marcos. A city dispatcher told the committee that if new people are answering emergency calls from 10 miles away, “you will lose all that geographic knowledge.”
Another dispatcher said, “We are the first first-responders for the citizens of Kyle.”
Committee Chairman John Moseley, director of operations for San Marcos/Hays County EMS, said that all police departments want to have their own dispatchers at the station.
“If the consolidated dispatch does go through, Kyle does not want to be the only one not involved in this,” Moseley said. “You do not want this to be the island of Kyle.”
The committee voted to recommend that the council go ahead with the call center plan.
