---

---

(Updated at 4:37 p.m. Monday to include information from Sheriff Garrett Scott.)

Costs, staffing needs and equity for both parties will fuel negotiations as Crescent City and Del Norte County seeks to update an emergency dispatch and animal services agreement.

Noting that she signed the contracts as mayor when the agreement was last updated about 10 years ago, Councilor Kelly Schellong volunteered to serve on an ad-hoc committee tasked with holding these negotiations. She said she already spoke with Sheriff Garrett Scott, who wanted some background information from her.

“One of the key things that Sheriff Scott passed on to me that resonated with me is for dispatch — it’s about safety and saving lives,” Schellong said Tuesday. “They have five dispatchers and an example he gave me was there was a homicide recently and one dispatcher is handling that and five other ambulance calls are coming in. And if they were to miss one thing it could affect somebody’s life. That resonated with me, but that’s just the big picture. There are a lot of nuances underneath it.”

Schellong’s colleague, Jason Greenough also volunteered to sit on that ad-hoc committee and participate in contract negotiations with the county.

The agreement Del Norte County has with Crescent City to provide emergency dispatch and animal control services originated in the early 2000s and was last updated in 2008 or 2009, City Manager Eric Wier told the Wild Rivers Outpost on Monday.

The existing agreement includes a cost escalation each year that’s about 75 percent of the consumer price index. But because costs on the county side have increased, officials there want to take a look at the whole agreement and “talk about increases that would be substantially greater than CPI,” Wier said.

“The original ask of the city is for the city to fund not only what we’re currently funding, which is approximately $100,000, but then to fund an additional dispatcher to the tune of $80,000,” Wier told the Outpost. “That hasn’t been an official ask from the county, but those are the initial conversations we’re looking at.”

Del Norte County Sheriff Garrett Scott said that calls for service and incidents in Crescent City account for 30 percent of the overall calls the county dispatch center handles. Scott said if he were to bill the city "for their current costs at 30 percent of the calls," the city would be paying $236,000. Those costs haven't increased since 2009, Scott said.

The Del Norte County Sheriff's Office currently has six dispatch positions, including a supervisor. Each dispatcher goes through a month-long POST Certified training course and is entitled to two to three weeks of vacation each year plus any sick time.

Each year dispatchers field about 15,000 DNSO calls; 8,700 CCPD calls and incidents; 2,000 Crescent Fire & Rescue calls; 4,000 Del Norte Ambulance calls and roughly 600 calls total from Klamath, Fort Dick and Smith River volunteer fire departments, Scott said.

"One dispatcher cannot continue to deal with that," he said, adding that one dispatcher costs the county between $103,000-108,000 annually in salaries and benefits. "My proposal is to help us get to nine dispatchers as opposed to six."

Increasing the number of dispatchers by three would cost the city about $343,000 annually, Scott told the Outpost, takinginto account his estimate that 30 percent of the calls that come into the county are for service within city limits.

"The city has been getting a very very good deal since 2009," he said. "I think what people need to understand wiht these negotiations and these talks is as the sheriff, it's never easy to reach out and tell your partners they're going to have to pay more and it's never something you want to have to do, but unfortunately it's the cost that's there. It's about making the community better and bringing things up to today's needs."

Wier said the preliminary discussions to update the emergency dispatch and animal services agreement between the city and county predate his job as city manager. Those discussions have been ongoing between him and former county administrative officer Jay Sarina since before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Both parties’ goal is to provide equitable service for the city and the county, Wier said.

“Once we start to have these conversations it’s going to take the form of almost a masterplan where you look at what is the staffing that is needed, who are the partners that come in, who receives these services, what equipment do we need for the long run and what are some of the options that are out there,” he said. “One of the other options is even looking at regional options — how do we best combine these services?”

The Crescent City Council and Del Norte County Board of Supervisors will have final votes on the agreement, according to Wier.

Last week, after Greenough and Schellong volunteered to be on the ad-hoc committee to update the city and county agreement, Mayor Pro Tem Blake Inscore told them to be ready to “roll up their sleeves, stick to their guns and whatever other appropriate metaphor.”

“This is going to be a contentious thing,” he said. “There is a very divergent opinion about equity when it comes to both of these issues. We have looked at this. I was part of pulling numbers of every animal control thing and saying I want to see the log of everything that was in the city limits and going through the whole thing.”

---

SHARE →