Spokane officials warn fire response will be delayed, lives put at risk after ‘chaos’ of SREC divorce

Come April, fires burning in or near Spokane may burn a little longer because of a void in the computer system for the regional 911 dispatch service, slowing mutual aid between jurisdictions that blame each other for the flaw.

While no one seems to have a clear sense as to how long those delays could be,  officials from both the city and Spokane Regional Emergency Communications agree firefighting operations could suffer as a result for at least seven months and likely significantly longer.

And as with everything related to the messy divorce between the entities following the regional dispatcher’s decision in January to kick out the city, both sides solely blame the other for the breakup.

Currently, if a fire occurs anywhere in the county, the region’s 911 dispatch system can automatically find the nearest firefighting resources and send them to the incident, even if those responding resources are from a different jurisdiction than where the fire is occurring, Spokane Fire Chief Julie O’Berg explained Monday. When a fire is burning, city boundaries do not matter, only which hose is closest.

But the city and the regional dispatcher will soon no longer be partners. That tenuous relationship broke down entirely in January, when the SREC board voted to terminate its partnership with the Spokane Fire Department, for which it had been providing dispatch services since 2022, forcing the city to go at it totally alone. All in all, the city is eyeing as much as a $100 million bill to launch its own dispatch service and projects it needs up to 24 months to get it up and running.

It’s not entirely clear how much more time the city has – the Center Square recently reported the regional dispatcher refused to provide any extensions past a Jan. 1 end date, though SREC officials disputed this Monday – but when the relationship ends, Spokane will have to create its own 911 dispatch service. This summer, the city decided that would also include the software system that manages automatic dispatch, declining to partner with SREC for that service.

The regional 911 dispatch system will be switching software platforms in late March, and when it does, that new computer system will not contain any of the city’s fire resources, leading to a “black hole” of empty space in the middle of the county’s resource map, O’Berg reported. Instead of automatically backing each other up, each jurisdiction will have to manually turn to the other and call for mutual aid, leading to delays.

This “black hole” could linger until at least fall 2026, and then only if the city backed down from its plans to create its own, separate dispatch computer system, according to SREC officials. It could last as long as two years while the city finishes standing up that separate system – or it could be an indefinite problem, some SREC officials suggested Monday.

City officials and elected leaders expressed shock and confusion at the gap Monday, which they argued could endanger lives and property, with several saying that they couldn’t understand why the county couldn’t work with the city to prevent delayed emergency response.

“It’s not like we’re talking about people who don’t understand the consequences of what we’re talking about,” Spokane Councilman Jonathan Bingle commented at Monday’s meeting, referencing that the SREC board is made up of public safety officials. “This board is not ignorant of the effects of this decision, or the fact that it takes time to stand up our own (911 dispatcher).”

“What I can’t understand and won’t accept is that an agency like this is willing to just say ‘good luck,’ ” he added.

Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown argued in an interview that SREC should either delay switching platforms or simply do the work necessary to fill in the black hole before March.

“I believe that is just completely arbitrary,” Brown said. “Everyone who has ever had a software system knows you can delay your implementation date” and include the city.

Officials with the regional dispatcher agree that firefighting operations could be delayed by the gap in their system. But Cody Rohrbach, Spokane County Fire District 3 chief and chair of the regional dispatcher’s board, argues the agency has to launch in late March due to contractual obligations with the software vendor.

Brown has repeatedly accused SREC of imposing “arbitrary deadlines,” which multiple officials with the regional dispatcher pointed to on Monday – these deadlines weren’t arbitrary, they argued, but necessitated often by external factors, such as their contract with the new software vendor.

The city underestimates the “body of work” necessary to transfer the codes for Spokane’s dispatchable units to the new system, Rohrbach added, and the city was given a July deadline to choose whether to join the regional computer system or go it alone. According to a letter from O’Berg and Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall, the city decided the latter.

O’Berg argues the issues should not be conflated. The city did choose to stand up its own dispatch system for much the same reason that it had struggled to come to a broader agreement to remain in the regional dispatch system, she said: operational control and the ability to make changes “on the fly,” rather than to first have to “jump through hoops, for lack of a better word.”

That shouldn’t prevent the regional dispatcher from inputting the city’s firefighting resources into its system to maintain the ability to rapidly reinforce each other, O’Berg argued. Not only has the county refused to add the city’s resources to its map, it has “actively deleted” city resources from its new system that had already been added.

“What needs to happen now is a professional collaboration and professional separation, and in my opinion that isn’t happening,” O’Berg said. “I don’t think we can say public safety comes first if we don’t put that principle into action.”

But the city’s refusal to join the regional dispatch computer platform is exactly what is causing the “black hole,” argues Spokane County CEO and SREC board member Scott Simmons. The city of Spokane has refused to be full partners with SREC and decided it wouldn’t participate in the regional computer system, so it must proceed alone; managing the city’s units effectively means the regional agency is still acting as the city’s dispatcher at the very moment the city is trying to claw back what it perceives as its equitable share of the funding.

Simmons echoed Rohrbach, adding that the county needed roughly six months to add entities to the new system and the deadline for the city to be included by March came and went.

The city’s data was deleted during the switch between systems, but so was every other jurisdiction’s as staff worked to add in unit data from scratch, wrote SREC spokesperson Kelly Conley in a Tuesday email, following the initial publication of this story. The city’s data simply wasn’t added back in, but wasn’t targeted for deletion, she wrote. 

Conley continued to argue that the system would be less efficient even after the city fully started its own computer-assisted dispatch system, as the interface between the SREC and city programs would create a new point of failure.

Officials with the regional dispatcher argued that the city was foolhardy and wasteful to separate from the regional computer-assisted dispatch system, projecting the city would have to spend $5.7 million just to launch that program, roughly double what SREC would have charged the city to be part of the region’s program. City officials, meanwhile, argue SREC had asked the city to pay for a disproportionate amount of the cost for the regional dispatcher’s software update.

Elected officials appeared largely blindsided by the news that the fractured dispatch service would directly result in delays in mutual aid between jurisdictions, including Spokane County Commissioner Amber Waldref, a former Spokane city councilwoman.

“I wonder how many officials even know about this,” said Waldref, who learned about the issue on Friday. “I know everybody wants to have the highest level of safety and response to our community. … I am hoping we can find a way to manage this transition and have enough time to figure this out.”

Simmons, who stated unequivocally that the issue would not be resolved before March and cast doubt on whether it ever would be if the city didn’t pay up and join the regional computer system, wasn’t sure how elected officials were left in the dark, but argued that O’Berg and Hall should have known better.

O’Berg wrote in a text late Monday that Simmons did not understand the computer systems well enough to comment on what could and could not be done.

“There is no reason why the units could not have been entered so at least there was visibility” for regional dispatchers,” O’Berg stated.

Brown agreed.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Our system will include them. Their system should include us. That’s redundancy, and in the best interest of public safety. Why would you go backwards and resort to getting on the phone to operationalize mutual aid?”

Due to the size of the Spokane Fire Department compared to neighboring jurisdictions, Brown also argued that it was the residents of Spokane Valley, Mead and other surrounding areas who would suffer the most for this lapse of judgment.

In an email to other regional fire officials Wednesday, O’Berg lamented the souring relationship between the city and the regional dispatcher.

“Throughout this process, (SREC’s) approach has been marked by a lack of transparency, hidden agendas, gotchas and a petty, spiteful handling of what should have been a professional collaboration followed by a professional separation,” she wrote. “This has eroded trust and made genuine partnerships untenable.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated Tuesday afternoon with a correction regarding the deletion of the city of Spokane’s unit data from the regional 911 dispatcher’s new computer program. The regional dispatcher’s spokesperson Kelly Conley was originally quoted as saying the city’s data was targeted for deletion due to technical reasons, but she has since clarified that this statement was based on incorrect information, and that every jurisdiction’s unit data was deleted simultaneously during the system switchover, and the city’s data was not added back in.