Most calls to police or firefighters in suburban Salt Lake County are routed through a consolidated dispatch center in Murray called the Valley Emergency Communications Center (VECC).
VECC handles police and fire calls for West Valley City, West Jordan, South Jordan, Murray, Midvale and Sandy. It also takes fire calls for Riverton, Bluffdale, Draper and the Salt Lake County fire department.Salt Lake City and South Salt Lake's police and fire departments, and the Salt Lake County sheriff's office have their own dispatch centers.
Situated in the south end of the Murray City Hall, VECC is an electronic beehive of activity, handling as many as 1,200 calls each day, said executive director Terry Ingram.
Participating cities mothballed their individual dispatch centers in May 1988, when VECC first went on the air, becoming Salt Lake County's largest working example of shared services.
Elected officials or their representatives make up the center's board of trustees. Police and fire chiefs whose departments participate make up the center's operations board.
Balancing each entity's expectations has been VECC's delicate underbelly.
"We've all found that it's not an easy thing to consolidate services," said County Fire Chief Larry Hinman, a member of the operations board. "Because even though the service is the same, the interest of the parties can be different and the procedures for doing the same functions are different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
"The hard part is balancing all of those issues."
There have been times during VECC's developing stages when individual cities have had second thoughts about their participation. "I think all the agencies are always looking for the best efficiency they can get," Hinman said. "From time to time, an agency may think it's in its interest to go elsewhere. But fortunately we've worked those issues through."
Giving up "local control" is perpetually one of the most difficult obstacles to deal with when sharing services.
Sandy Police Chief Gary Leonard said he would like to have his own dispatch, but it would cost more and would not be worth it. VECC has "come a long way," said Leonard, who took the job as Sandy's chief after dispatch services were consolidated.
Hinman said consolidating services was billed as a cost-saving measure when the idea was in the development stage. "When we first opened the center, it cost everybody less."
But unlike Sandy, the county is now spending more to share services than it would if it had its own dispatch center. But Hinman said his department also gets more services than it would be able to justify buying if on its own.
And some advantages cannot be measured financially, he said. "There's nothing quite like having the Murray fire dispatcher sit right next to the county fire dispatcher."
"There was a time when I believed that county fire maybe didn't belong in the valley center, but I would leave only over my dead body now," Hinman said.
An increasing work load is the biggest change VECC has dealt with since opening five years ago. "Overall, volume has gone up almost 36 percent in the past three years," Ingram said. "We handle a lot more calls now than we ever anticipated when we first met and talked about the center."
Dispatching policies have been made standard between agencies. New radio systems increased costs but made interagency communications possible because of common frequencies.
And officials from other parts of the country regularly tour the center to see if it could work for them. "In dispatch communications, it's an idea that's coming all over. We just happened to be on the leading edge. There were a few others when we started. Now we've seen them in a lot of places," Ingram said.
And while criticism abounded of police efforts to control the 1991 hostage situation at Alta View Hospital, the dispatch efforts won VECC several awards.
Some community leaders have questioned how Sheriff Aaron Kennard can advocate complete police consolidation when his office does not belong to VECC.
"If he can't dispatch with us . . . we're going to turn the whole ball of wax to him?" asked Anthony Murphy, South Jordan city administrator.
"This is one major thing that would have to be resolved if we went to shared services," Midvale Mayor Everett Dahl said. "(The sheriff) has created a complete void in communications."
But sheriff's spokesman Jim Potter said VECC was developed before Kennard became sheriff. The sheriff's office did not join because of "political turf wars." Now the sheriff can't join because his communications system is not compatible to VECC's.
Although Kennard is "stuck in the middle," Potter said he is strongly considering joining VECC or at least linking up to them.
Deseret News staff writer Brian West contributed to this report.