Agreement gives Spokane two years to fully transition away from regional 911, avoids ‘potential crisis’

Emergency calls from Spokane residents will be answered.

Spokane County and city of Spokane leaders announced on Thursday they had come to an agreement to allow the city to stay in the regional 911 system long enough to set up a new service.

Longstanding tensions between the city and the region’s independent 911 dispatch service become irreconcilable this summer as Spokane Regional Emgency Communications service announced the city would have to leave by the end of the year.

But in just the last two weeks before the city was to be kicked out and forced to create its own 911 dispatch – a massive undertaking that the city said it would be unable to complete in that time – the two agencies and Spokane County struck a deal giving the city two years to fully transition and settling the protracted debate over funding.

“Over the past few months together, we crafted a plan that addresses both immediate needs and future challenges, ensuring continuity of services and providing a road map that benefits the entire region,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said at a Thursday news conference, flanked by county commissioners and dispatch officials.

In meetings facilitated by Spokane County Commissioners Al French and Chris Jordan and negotiations motivated by the looming possibility of lengthy court battles and service disruptions that could lead to fires burning longer, the parties managed to reach a compromise that had previously eluded them.

“Local jurisdictions were hurtling toward potential crisis with bitter court battles, first responders put at risk and disruptions to some 911 services as real possibilities,” Jordan said Thursday. “But not today. No more. We are changing that narrative, and we are replacing it with cooperation.”

“A cliff is a great way to force compromise,” said Spokane Councilman Michael Cathcart, who was one of the city’s negotiators. “We want to avoid those, but I will just say I think everybody honestly saw the seriousness, understood what was at risk, and came together.”

The agreement is a notable breakthrough in what had been a tense relationship between the city of Spokane and the Spokane Regional Emergency Communications dispatch service since the beginning.

When the regional dispatcher was launched in 2018, it served the county and nearly every city as both the primary Public Safety Answering Point – the ones taking the initial 911 call – and the secondary PSAP – the ones directly dispatching a police or fire department.

The city, which had been the most significant dispatcher in the county prior to 2018, resisted fully joining, citing myriad concerns including maintaining quality and from keeping its dispatchers employed. While SREC dispatchers would pick up an initial 911 call made inside the city, the call would then be routed to city dispatchers to organize a response from the Spokane fire and police departments.

Staffing problems prompted the Spokane Fire Department to fully join SREC in 2022, but to this day the Spokane Police Department is dispatched by the city’s secondary PSAP service. For years, SREC insisted that the city should fully buy in.

When Brown came into office in 2024, the debate was 6 years old. Not long after her inauguration, Brown says she was faced with an impatient SREC board that demanded immediate action. Brown saw it as an arbitrary deadline being forced on a new mayor; SREC officials saw it as a negotiation that had dragged on for years and needed a resolution.

Negotiations seemed to have boiled over in January with the introduction of a bill by Spokane’s state legislators that would have wrested control over one of the regional dispatchers’ main sources of funding. By June, the SREC board voted to kick the city out completely, giving it a deadline of Jan. 1 to launch its own primary PSAP for the first time in modern memory.

The agreement approved Thursday gives the city two more years to get there, slowly phasing out Spokane’s dispatch services in three steps.

By October 2026, the city will need to start answering nonemergency Crime Check calls currently handled by SREC. By January 2027, the city will take over secondary dispatching services for the fire department. By January 2028, all 911 calls made in Spokane will be answered by city dispatchers.

Funding will also be split between the two entities, with more going to the city as each new phase is reached.

The earlier funding dispute was how one of the sources of funding, roughly $5 million annually from a 911 excise tax, should be split between the city and the regional dispatcher. The city had pushed for the funding to be split by call volume – about 55% of the 911 calls in the county originate from within Spokane City limits. SREC believed the city was only owed the tax dollars generated within its own borders, which they estimated at closer to 42% based on the city’s population.

While the city got the additional time it requested under the agreement, SREC got the funding split it had wanted. The city will eventually receive the portion of the tax generated in its borders, though only after the state Department of Revenue provides a good estimate for what the split should be. In the interim, the city will receive a share proportional to its population, broken down further based on how far the transition has gone.

“This wasn’t about any agency or any single entity winning,” said Cody Rohrbach, Spokane County Fire District 3 chief and chair of the regional dispatcher’s board. “What we’re getting is service delivery tied to funding … there’s key milestones identified in the agreement that as the City of Spokane takes on additional services, they get additional funding.”