Short on staff for nearly two years, Astoria’s emergency dispatch center will temporarily move operations to Seaside in October.

The dispatch center has been running with only a handful of dispatchers since early 2020, a situation that has required staff to shoulder a significant amount of overtime each month and that Astoria Police Chief Geoff Spalding said is undesirable and unsustainable. Meanwhile, the Seaside Dispatch Center has been fully staffed for a while for the first time in more than a decade.

Over the past year, Seaside dispatchers have traveled north to help out in Astoria, but the new agreement between the two cities will place Astoria’s four dispatchers in the Seaside office until four new hires can be fully trained. The arrangement could last as long as six months.

The combined office will handle 911 calls countywide, together covering all the fire and police entities served under separate Seaside and Astoria dispatch agreements.

The arrangement means there will be more dispatchers available to field calls at any given time — a major plus for emergency responders, said Mitch Brown, the communications manager for the Seaside Police Department. The combined dispatch could shorten the time it takes to organize mutual aid calls.

Staffing levels

The Astoria Police Department can’t point to any one reason why staffing levels have dipped so low. Some dispatchers retired and others left unexpectedly. Four new dispatchers are in training or set to begin training soon and could be on board in the next three to six months. The dispatch center is authorized for nine full-time dispatch positions, one operations supervisor and one communications manager.

It can easily take up to six months to get someone proficient in dispatching. Then some hires ultimately discover the job is not for them once they are working the desk. It is a difficult job that requires a high level of multitasking skills, Spalding said.

Then there are the peculiarities and challenges of dispatching within small communities. A dispatcher must remain professional no matter what, said Jennifer Schermerhorn, a Seaside dispatcher.

“And you may know someone who is calling 911 on the worst day of their life,” she said.

Talks of consolidation — to combine the two dispatch centers — have occurred at various times over the years with no concrete steps toward a single countywide dispatch center. Seaside has continued to invest in its own equipment and continues to fine-tune radio issues to reliably reach all corners of its coverage area.

The combined operations set to begin in October could act as a sort of test run for future consolidation, Brown allowed.

“We’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t work,” he said.

But laying the groundwork for possible consolidation is not the point of the agreement between Seaside and Astoria, officials say.

“This is to address a more immediate need of staffing shortages,” Spalding said. “We are definitely not going into this that it’s a test for some future consolidation effort.”

“The simple answer of it is anything is always possible,” said Jon Rahl, Seaside’s assistant city manager. But, he added, echoing Spalding, “It’s not the conversation right now. The conversation is, ‘We have a staffing issue. How are we going to solve it?’”

There are other issues that need to be addressed in any discussion about consolidation. It isn’t as straightforward as moving all operations to one of the existing centers.

Both dispatch centers are in the tsunami inundation zone. In more recent talks about possible consolidation, discussions have focused on the need for any consolidated center to be located outside of the inundation zone, Spalding said.

And while the separate Astoria and Seaside dispatch centers now use the same software and hardware, the dispatchers wear different hats. In Seaside, dispatchers also handle some front desk work and manage the records division, Spalding noted. The Seaside center also handles a lower volume of calls because they have fewer subscribers to dispatch services than Astoria.

Workarounds

Seaside dispatch supports Seaside police, Seaside fire, Cannon Beach police, Gearhart police and several rural fire protections services on the south end of Clatsop County. Astoria dispatchers serve the Astoria and Warrenton police and fire departments, a number of rural fire protection services on the north end of the county and the sheriff’s office.

Still, Spalding told the Astoria City Council at a meeting last week that the workarounds the two centers have developed to address staffing shortages in Astoria mean the different dispatch staffs have now worked closely together. They’ve covered areas of the county they wouldn’t have before, are familiar with each other’s operations and have established relationships with one another.

The agreement with Seaside could be extended if necessary. Though Astoria dispatchers may be in Seaside for up to six months, Spalding expects it will be closer to three.