All five Santa Barbara County supervisors voted on Tuesday to separate fire and medical dispatch operations from the Sheriff’s Office, capping a two-year effort by fire chiefs to run their own emergency communications center and highlighting the longstanding rift between the public safety entities. The vote also started the process of expanding the county’s existing Emergency Operations Center on Cathedral Oaks Road to accommodate the new fire/medical dispatch facility. Construction is estimated to cost $10.4 million with an annual budget of $2.5 million.
Insider guns ’n' hoses drama aside, the chiefs and county Emergency Medical Director Dr. Angelo Salvucci insist, somewhat counter-intuitively, that a separation will actually increase the speed and efficiency of their services. Currently, they explained, fire and ambulance crews throughout the Santa Barbara area only respond to calls within their respective jurisdictions. The new Regional Fire Communications Facility, as it’s named, would allow for borderless “closest-resource dispatching,” thus reducing response times.
Sheriff Bill Brown argued the exact opposite on Tuesday, claiming the new system would slow reaction and endanger lives, since all 9-1-1 calls would still first go through Sheriff’s dispatchers in their Calle Real headquarters before the appropriate ones were transferred to fire/medical. Two transfers would be necessary if the call first went to the CHP, he said. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “with separation, there will be delays.” There was good reason the county consolidated dispatch services all the way back in 1977, he said, and it’s stayed that way since. Brown also cited the extra cost of building a new facility when the county is already spending tens of millions of public safety dollars on the new jail and converting its Blackhawk helicopter to a Firehawk.