photo by: Douglas County

Douglas County's Emergency Communication Center is pictured in this undated photo.

While many people in Douglas County were shifting to remote work early on in the coronavirus pandemic, Douglas County Emergency Communications was staying put.

The department’s director, Tony Foster, said there wasn’t a choice. The department handles 911 dispatch services for the entire county, minus the University of Kansas, from the Emergency Communication Center in the Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center in downtown Lawrence. Without dispatchers in the center, directing first responders would have been impossible — and would’ve had dire consequences.

“We have to provide this service,” Foster told the Journal-World earlier this week. “If we don’t provide this service, people die.”

Douglas County leaders made their final decisions about where to direct the county’s American Rescue Plan Act funding last month, and a significant chunk went toward making sure Emergency Communications remains functional in the years to come. Of the roughly $7 million set aside for internal county departments, Emergency Communications received $920,599 for three projects.

Along with providing 911 telephone services, the department provides radio dispatching personnel and equipment for the 23 law enforcement, fire and medical response agencies serving the cities, townships and rural areas of Douglas County.

“They always say that we are the first first responder,” Foster said. “Without us, you have no police, you have no ambulance, you have no fire truck — 911, that’s what we do. We’re the hub, or what they call the ‘air traffic controller,’ of all emergency aid in the county.”

One request for $240,992 will help upgrade and reconfigure the Emergency Communication Center — which dispatchers work to operate around the clock — with a focus on keeping workers healthy. Foster said that would be through purchasing antimicrobial emergency dispatch consoles that don’t suffer detrimental effects from frequent cleanings.

The pandemic prompted the department to clean even more than it already had been, since it needed to avoid a spate of positive coronavirus cases among dispatchers to remain in operation. Foster said cleaners like bleach were hard on the older consoles they’ve been using, though.

“We clean our consoles every single day, twice a day, every shift,” Foster said. “We work 12-hour shifts. So when you’re using those type of chemicals on that kind of surface for that long, it tends to break down those surfaces.”

That work didn’t stop, even during the height of the pandemic. Foster said working from home simply wasn’t an option, so the department continued to come in to work as normal. Concern for being able to continue that work extended even into the staff’s personal lives, Foster said; dispatchers knew that they couldn’t afford to miss any time.

The other two projects are tied to the department’s radio network, and those split the remaining ARPA funds almost evenly. One of them replaces an aging microwave system that Foster said was essential to the public safety radio network’s operations. In a nutshell, he said that network connects five sites that effectively “act as one,” so when a sheriff’s deputy talks at one site, a medical first responder on the other side of the county will be able to hear that message at the exact same time.

Microwave radios help transmit that data from tower to tower and allow for that simultaneous broadcast, Foster said. The upgrade keeps that ring of connections functional, and also keeps it connected to a larger, statewide network operated by the state of Kansas.

“Without it, and if those started to fail, then you’d have system outages throughout the area,” Foster said. “And we’d have situations where we might think you’re receiving radio traffic and they’re not receiving radio traffic. It’s a very important aspect of that network.”

The third project will replace 70 mobile radios for Douglas County Sheriff’s Office deputies’ vehicles. The current radios are obsolete and three years past the end of useful life, which means the manufacturer — Motorola — no longer services them.

All three projects target technology that is nearing or past the end of its lifespan, Foster said. The Emergency Communication Center, for example, saw its last upgrade in 2014, and the average lifespan of the consoles being replaced is seven to 12 years. The microwave system was also installed in 2014 and had begun to degrade because of its age.

“Everything that we did was an upgrade or replacement of aging or existing pieces that we already have, but something that we needed and had to happen,” Foster said. “It was either going to be we take this opportunity to do it now and we refresh, or we end up paying for it probably within the next year or so anyway through other funding mechanisms.”

Completing all these projects at once wouldn’t have been possible in a year without pandemic relief aid, Foster said. The project to replace sheriff’s radios, for example, had been in the works for about three years already and would’ve taken another two or three years to finish without ARPA funding. The other projects are much the same; console replacement wouldn’t happen for another four or five years without the aid dollars, Foster said.

The influx of ARPA cash has opened up a couple of avenues for Emergency Communications regarding what other projects it allows the department to afford. For one, Foster said, it has allowed for the purchase of devices that allow for internet and satellite connectivity in the department’s mobile dispatch center. If there’s ever another event like the EF-4 tornado that struck Douglas County in May of 2019, it’ll help the center to operate normally regardless of how the radio network infrastructure is affected.

Foster said the department would also be looking to purchase new software packages later this year and next year that will provide an enhanced view of regional emergency situations.

“This is a significant amount of money for our agency,” Foster said. “To be able to do this all in one year, this is five to seven years worth of funding mechanisms that, quite frankly, (translates to) five to seven years of stagnant activity within the center when it comes to technology upgrades. In our realm, in even two to three years, technology changes so fast and so rapidly. Things that we’re able to bring for the citizens of the county — and not only our county, but other counties also. It’s exciting to be able to look to the future and see where we can go and what we can do with it.”