Spokane scrambling to set up full 911 dispatcher after negotiations crumble

The city of Spokane will have to establish its own full 911 dispatch service for the first time in modern memory after negotiations with the regional dispatcher fell apart for what appears to be the final time.

On Thursday, the Spokane Regional Emergency Communications board voted to finally end seven years of negotiations to fully integrate the city of Spokane. Every law and fire agency in the county, with the exception of the Spokane Police Department despite the city’s fire department being included, has been a part of the SREC dispatch service for years.

Thursday’s board vote means not only will the Spokane Fire Department be kicked out of SREC at the beginning of 2026, but the partnership will be terminated in a deeper and potentially much costlier sense.

The city has operated its own fire and police dispatch services before, but the breakdown in negotiations as board members argued the city continued to demand disproportionate funding and city officials argued the board was unwilling to give the city proportionate control means the city will have to go it alone to an extent without recent precedent.

Even before the regional dispatch service launched in 2018, various agencies in the county worked together to get 911 calls to the right first responders.

If someone had called 911 for a fire inside Spokane city limits, for instance, the first person to pick up would have been a county 911 operator, which worked in what is known as a primary Public Safety Answering Point. That call would have been transferred to a communications center operated by the city of Spokane, known as a secondary Public Safety Answering Point, which would have then dispatched the relevant fire agency – in this case Spokane Fire Department, but just as capable of dispatching other fire districts to calls in their service area.

If the call had been for a law enforcement need, the county-run primary PSAP would have instead routed it to either the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office or the Spokane Police Department, which operated their own secondary PSAP dispatch service.

When the regional dispatcher was created in 2018, Spokane Regional Emergency Communications took on primary and secondary PSAP roles for every one of its fully integrated law and fire agencies, dispatching them directly, but continued to route calls to Spokane Fire Department until that agency joined in 2022 and still to this day routes calls to the Spokane Police Department as a secondary PSAP. Essentially, if someone calls 911, a SREC operator is the first person to answer, even as the agency and the city of Spokane have quarreled for years over its partnership.

Thursday’s vote doesn’t just kick out the Spokane Fire Department; it ends the partnership with the city in a deeper way. The city will have to create, possibly for the first time, its own full-service 911 dispatcher, primary PSAP included.

And it potentially has less than six months to do so.

In a Thursday letter to the Spokane County Commission and the SREC board, Mayor Lisa Brown argued this arbitrary timeline would put lives at risk, claiming experts recommend at least 18 months to create a new full 911 dispatch service.

“In the interests of public safety for all residents and visitors served by the 911 system and fairness to all taxpayers in the region, the City does not accept a termination until we have finalized a plan for the safe and smooth transition to a City PSAP and resolved the issue of equitable apportionment (of taxes to fund the service),” Brown wrote.

That Jan. 1 deadline isn’t necessarily set in stone, said Cody Rohrbach, Fire District 3 chief and chair of the regional dispatcher’s board.

“The regional center is invested in the city being successful in that transition. … We’re willing to talk about a reasonable timeline,” as long as there are good-faith efforts to make progress toward separation, Rohrbach said.

Still, he argued the city has been aware that this decision could be coming since at least the beginning of the year, when the board initially recommended terminating its relationship with the city, and noted that Jan. 1 is when a new state law kicks in that will redirect a significant portion of the regional dispatch services’ tax funds to the city.

Fraught from the start

While former Spokane Mayor David Condon had championed the new regional dispatch service as more cost -effective and argued it would cut down on 911 call times by eliminating transfers from primary to secondary PSAPs, most other city elected leaders and labor organizations have resisted the transition from the start.

There were longstanding concerns about what would happen to the city employees who had managed the pre-existing regional fire dispatch service and secondary police dispatcher, questions about the cost effectiveness and whether the promised efficiencies would actually manifest.

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 board that demanded immediate action.

The mayor has pointed to a report from an independent consultant to argue that the city deserves a proportionate representation on the board: The city has two representatives on the 10-person board, but makes up more than 40% of the county population and a majority of the 911 calls. She also believes user fees are exorbitant and has argued that the board, currently comprising mostly law and fire chiefs, should be composed of elected leaders directly accountable to citizens as they are making decisions about tax dollars.

In a Thursday interview, she pointed to the regional dispatchers’ talks about building or acquiring a new headquarter facility, arguing that initial proposals had been in the tens of millions and the city resisted this lavish expense.

Spokane Regional Emergency Communications announced in December that it had purchased a $9.1 million, 44,000-square-foot building in Spokane Valley that it will begin operating out of in 2026. The agency will pay for the building with its $24 million reserves; Brown has pointed to the depth of those reserves as evidence of overly high user fees, which she believes function as a second tax on residents.

The mayor argued Thursday that the board has been unwilling to make any substantive compromises with the city.

“There’s been a pattern of SREC being impatient and demanding the city just go along, and we can’t do that,” Brown said. “But it’s been ‘Our way or the highway.’ ”

The regional dispatch board has argued that its operations, critical for public safety, should not be subject to the changing whims of politicians and the electorate. It has also resisted giving too much control of a regional board to a single jurisdiction, Rohrbach argued.

Tensions boiled over in January with the introduction of a bill by Spokane’s state legislators that would have wrested control of one of the regional dispatchers’ main sources of funding.

The fight was over the roughly $5 million of excise tax dollars generated per year in the county. About 55% of the 911 calls in Spokane County last year came from within Spokane city limits, and city leadership and their allies in the Legislature argued the city should receive roughly that large a slice of the pie, noting the city’s importance to the region and the disproportionate share of people commuting into the city for work.

But the rest of SREC’s leadership believes that the city is only owed the tax dollars generated within its own borders, which they estimate at closer to 42% based on the city’s population, implicitly arguing the city should not receive funding to compensate for its higher per-capita need.

This bill prompted the regional dispatch board’s initial January vote to recommend removing the city of Spokane from the partnership.

Tensions had seemed to cool somewhat, however, after an amended bill passed the legislature in May that left the final apportionment undetermined. The city and the rest of the SREC coalition can either come to an agreement or fight it out in Spokane County Superior Court. Either way, payments are due to begin in 2026.

The city and regional dispatcher attempted to re-enter negotiations about a possible merger and the potential apportionment of funds. This seems to have only been a temporary reprieve, however, as mediation failed earlier this month.

Brown declined to comment on what caused the breakdown, saying she wasn’t sure if mediation was legally disclosable. Rohrbach said the city continued to demand the excise taxes be split by demand, not on population.

Along with excise taxes and user fees, the regional dispatcher relies on voter-approved sales taxes for its funding. A 2021 law already carves up the city’s portion of those sales taxes, which the city estimates to be about 65% of the total fund.

“The irony of this is, until those house bills were pushed, who do you think benefited the most from the 911 and sales funds?” Rohrbach argued. “Nobody had apportioned those tax dollars, and (the city was) spending them down disproportionately to any other agency, disproportionately to their population.”