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Municipal Consolidation - Practicality Over Parochialism
By Jay Gsell
Genesee County Administrator
In Genesee County what started out as a long and sometimes laborious process of replacing a 1902 vintage Sheriff’s Administration/Communication building with a 21st Century Administration Center and E911 state of the art countywide services building also provided an opportunity for the City of Batavia (population 15,800) and Genesee County (population 60,000) to merge City Police and the County Sheriff’s separate dispatching services. The project was made possible in part by a successful Shared Municipal Services Grant and State Member Item money totaling $419,000 which, by October 2008, will culminate in a joint City/County E911 Dispatching Operation within a newly constructed Sheriff’s Administration Building.
Since 1992, all emergency communication in Genesee County has used 800 MHz Motorola trunked radio systems for E911 communications. The County Sheriff has overseen a part of a core service of all police, fire, emergency management
and first responders except for the City of Batavia Police Department, LeRoy Village Police Department and Ambulance Corps. Numerous efforts to achieve full dispatch consolidation
since then have been thwarted by issues of local control, procedural differences
of opinion
and underlying
personality clashes dating back from two to three decades.
The County continued
to invest in the 800 MHz Motorola system, and the issue of a new building to house Sheriff Administration and E911 was debated for approximately 20 years. As time passed, the County’s “vintage” facility was becoming both
a public safety and maintenance
nightmare. The County purchased land from the City of Batavia adjacent to, and originally donated by, the US Veterans Administration which is within a good Tiger Woods drive from the New York State Thruway and our primary commercial
retail/racino road (sales tax hub). They proceeded to design, bid and build a $9.2 million state of the art Sheriff’s Administration Building and E911 Emergency Communications
Center, whose plans included enough physical and technological capacity to include all E911/dispatching services within the new facility which was completed in September 2007.
Until the financial doldrums of the City of Batavia (5 year growing deficit of $2.5 million) and a change in both administration and elected leadership finally came home to roost, the practicality and service improvement advantages of the E911 merger were still being resisted up until the winter of 2007-08. The City and County administrative staff collaborated on a Shared Municipal Service Grant to encourage legislative
action locally to move the merger forward after years of fits and starts and frustration. Tangential issues of City Police clerical support, information
and access to the police station on 2nd and 3rd shifts and whether or not this first step was a precursor to additional law enforcement staff and space consolidation were finally put in perspective and the intermunicipal agreement to effectuate the commitment and logistics are now being finalized for both local legislative bodies to ratify. Not to mention, that after the first year the City of Batavia will save approximately $200,000 in annual expenses; and the County’s fiscal impact due to an ongoing accreditation process and call volume needs will not grow to the same extent as the City’s savings, thus saving all county taxpayers in the long run. Within the last month the Village of LeRoy (population 4,300), also facing significant property tax increases and with a more proactive political leadership change, has decided to merge its dispatch service into the Sheriff’s countywide operation.
Lessons learned: the usual, even what seemed logical, does not always occur; patience and perseverance usually pay off in the end; the integrity and efficacy of the principal actors; i.e. Sheriff’s Office, E911 Practices Board, appointed and elected officials most closely involved in the analysis and transition process and having the answers to most questions before or as they were being asked. Also critical to success
is having the financial resources and technology largely in place and the leverage of community support, taxpayer interest and long term savings in operating and capital costs. This merger of essential services could be the precursor of more effective collaborations and improvements to local government services which is what we are all about. Also, the proverbial axiom—timing is everything; certain law enforcement personalities and other elected officials retired, are no longer serving or absconded to another state; thus, most of those persons being roadblocks to this ultimate win-win process are now gone and thereby those of us still serving were able to move the process forward and finally be proactive and long term solution-oriented.