Numbers
show emergency calls made to the E-911 Center last year were largely
from the county and Lenoir City.
The total number of dispatch calls tallied 64,132,
with 39,599 coming from the county and 17,067 coming from Lenoir
City. Loudon made up the remaining 7,466 calls.
“Really to have all of our communications
centralized, our dispatchers, our whole 911 staff, they go above and
beyond,” Rollen “Buddy” Bradshaw, Loudon County mayor, said. “To
have that centralized communication, luckily we’re very fortunate to
live in a community and a county where not many bad things happen,
but in the event it is they do just an outstanding job coordinating
when there is something that requires multiple agencies. The job
they do is just unbelievable, it’s incredible.”
Since 2009, the county has provided $540,000
annually, which E-911 Director Jennifer Estes said is mainly for
employee costs. The cities do not provide funding.
E-911 does receive $590,000 from the state, but Estes
said that largely goes toward equipment.
No attempts have been made to increase the level of
funding from Loudon County, Estes said. Instead, expense cuts have
been made to avoid asking for more money, which Estes called
challenging.
“Our technology costs obviously increase each year,”
Estes said. “Equipment needs and as technology advances across the
state, our technology needs increase as well. So equipment is
expensive for 911, and then obviously the cost of employees never
decreases — it seems with health care and everything that is
affiliated with having employees always increases. ... We do as much
training as we can in-house to reduce training and travel expenses.
We don’t contract out some services that other places do, cleaning
services, things like that. We do that — our employees take care of
those things to help reduce costs.
“We’re very conscientious with utilities, we treat it
like we do our house,” she added. “If you’re not in a room we turn a
light off, those kind of things. We just try to be good stewards of
the money that we operate off of.”
Loudon County Commissioner Van Shaver has pushed for
months for the cities to pay a “fair share of the support” for 911
services.
“The argument you always hear from the cities are,
‘We pay county taxes too’,” Shaver said. “That in itself is correct,
but they pay county taxes for county services. The county is having
to provide the 911 system, the 911 service, everything that comes to
that — NCIC, license plate checks, everything that has to done
through 911, we provide that service to the city police departments
for enforcing city laws and regulations. So essentially the county
taxpayers, along with the cities paying county taxes, are paying for
county services, but these two city police departments use that
service. We’re all also paying for city services and the cities
themselves don’t pay a dime to 911.”
National Crime Information Center entries in 2017
amounted to 55 percent from Lenoir City, 40.3 percent from Loudon
County and 4.7 percent from Loudon, according to the Loudon County
Emergency Communications District 2017 Annual Report.
Commission Chairman Steve Harrelson said the county
won’t back away from its annual contribution even if the cities
don’t assist financially.
“I think it’s a situation where the 911 board and
county commission both have talked about as far as the cities
contributing some money toward 911,” Harrelson said. “It’s a
situation that the citizens of both cities, Lenoir City and
Loudon, are county taxpayers also so I can see both sides of the
cities contributing or not just based on citizens being city
taxpayers and county taxpayers, and the county’s already
contributing to 911. So I really can’t fault the cities for not
contributing additional money when taxpayers are already
contributing through the county.”
The county has been the sole contributor of the
three entities for years after Lenoir City backed out of
funding.
“We felt like it was a county service, not a city
service, so we didn’t fund it that particular year and I don’t
know what year it was without looking things up but we decided
then we just wouldn’t fund it that year and see,” Eddie Simpson,
Lenoir City councilman, said. “The county for the next 10 years
never asked us for it. Now when they built the new 911 center
then they did come back and say, ‘You all used to contribute but
you don’t anymore. Would you be willing to do it now?’ We just
felt the same that it was a county function, and it should be
funded by the county.”
Loudon City Councilman Jeff Harris said he would
be willing to listen to a funding request.
“I would be for looking at what we could do to
help them with that if it came up before our council, sure,”
Harris said. “Now whether if they’ve done it before in the past,
they may certainly have, I’m just not aware of it.”
Estes has previously attempted to secure funding
from the cities, including asking for a percentage based off
call volume or a set amount.
“So it would depend on negotiations with the
cities to how would they want to do that,” Estes said. “One lump
sump? Would they want to do a percentage? There’s multiple
options that could be done.”