Squamish residents calling 911 will soon be talking to dispatchers in Vancouver's E-Comm building in a system officials say will better serve the community, and lower costs to taxpayers.
Squamish RCMP's current in-house dispatching unit will be transferred to Vancouver's E-Comm building by mid-October, joining Sea to Sky communities from West Vancouver to Whistler and Pemberton in a regional, corridor-wide police radio system.
"Over about the past year there have been discussions with the province, the District of Squamish, CUPE and the employees over centralized dispatch for Sea to Sky Regional Police Services," said Sea to Sky Regional Police Service Inspector Norm McPhail.
"After long negotiations between the province and the District of Squamish and the employees, a decision has been made to move dispatch to E-Comm for all of Sea to Sky."
E-Comm - short for Emergency Communications for Southwest British Columbia Incorporated - is a privately-held corporation providing regional emergency communications for southwest B.C. out of its 70,000 sq. ft. call centre.
With an annual operating budget of approximately $49 million, E-Comm is governed under the Emergency Communications Corporations Act.
The system allows for anecdotal information about the community and this, along with a 14-day orientation period that makes all dispatchers familiar with each Sea to Sky community they serve, will ensure that local knowledge is not lost once workers are no longer based in town.
"Because often times there are difficulties in addresses where they're not properly marked, those kind of things, they're taken around and given a complete orientation in that manner," said McPhail. "With dispatch too, there has been a fairly high change over so how we capture that information is we flag files, we flag addresses within systems where there are constant problems or on-going problems."
The move to E-Comm means that about eight local full time dispatch jobs will be relocated out of Squamish, but the CUPE workers themselves are effectively assured some form of job placement, according to McPhail.
"Right now we're working with our employees as to future employ," he said. "There's obviously a process for filling in positions, but we're looking at filling those position either between E-Comm or within the RCMP office. It's ultimately up to the employees what they want to do, but we're working with them very closely to try to accommodate them."
Mayor Ian Sutherland said the new system "is not a 100 per cent perfect deal" because it could mean the loss of local jobs, but "when you look at the balance of what's good and what's bad about it, this is going to make for a safer community, a better community and better RCMP policing for our community."
The move is also good news for the District of Squamish's budgetary bottom line since it takes away an approximate $400,000 commitment to pay for dispatching costs. The change is a result of negotiations with the province, and now brings Squamish police funding responsibilities in-line with many other B.C. communities, said Sutherland.
"Squamish has been, I guess, at odds with the province for quite a number of years that we always pay for local dispatch and many communities don't," said Sutherland. "We were at odds, I guess, saying 'Hang on now, you're making us pay for dispatch, you're making us pay for all this, you know we have to get some fairness out of this.' So part of that fairness is the province taking over responsibility for dispatch."
The newly freed up funds may be diverted to acquiring services from specialized policing teams such as the Integrated Homicide Investigative Team (IHIT).
Squamish council decided not to pay an annual fee that would ensure IHIT's availability during budget talks earlier this year, but that decision could change depending on future negotiations with the province, said Sutherland.
"Our issue with IHIT is never that we didn't want to pay it," he said. "Our issue was that we were never really consulted on how we'd pay it and what the costs would be or anything like that. So what the province agreed to is that our staff and their staff will come up with a formula, probably going forward in 2008, that will allow us to pay a reasonable share toward those services. We never had a problem with paying towards it, our problem is we didn't want to pay a same fee as say Surrey was paying."
