The Hamilton County 911 center will add Soddy-Daisy’s calls to its plate Oct. 29, consolidating the city’s operations without layoffs, officials announced at a press conference Wednesday.
“Today is an important step as we add our seventh public safety answering point, which is the city of Soddy-Daisy, into the fold here, and they’ve become part of our family,” said Jeff Carney, executive director of the 911 center. “This brings us to where more than 99% of the 911 calls in this county are answered in this building and handled in this building.”
The Soddy-Daisy City Commission voted last month to grant the county authority to handle police and fire dispatch functions. The county mostly handled EMS dispatching already, Soddy-Daisy Police Chief Billy Petty said by phone.
Soddy-Daisy’s dispatch team has seven positions, six of which are staffed, Petty said. Under the terms of the county agreement, he said, those dispatchers will have the opportunity to go to work at Hamilton County. Petty said dispatchers’ pay, seniority and vacation days will transfer over.
Soddy-Daisy’s move to Hamilton County 911’s dispatch takes effect Oct. 29
“I mean other than the fact that our employees will have to drive to Amnicola,” he said, “there’s really not any negatives.”
(READ MORE: Hamilton County changes disaster plan after floods)
There are officer safety and technology boosts as well, Petty said. Hamilton County 911 can immediately patch radios together and give real-time information to all law enforcement agencies in the county.
The unification will help save lives by speeding up medical calls, according to Barbara Loveless, the director of operations for the Hamilton County 911 District and a resident of Soddy-Daisy. Right now, Soddy-Daisy’s center gathers information only to transfer those calls to the county.
“So those are minutes, those are seconds, valuable seconds that are lost, that this unification is gonna eliminate,” she said.
While the Hamilton County 911 center is not exempt from the national shortage of dispatchers, Loveless said, it’s been able to maintain above the national average for call response times.
Hamilton County 911 answers 97% of calls within nine seconds, Carney said, while the national standards require 90%.
Before operations were unified in 2009, Carney said, multiple centers sat in the same building but couldn’t help each other during times of high call volume. Unification helps provide deep coverage when needed, he said, like when calls about the Aug. 12 flash floods inundated the center.
“I know there’s times right now that Soddy-Daisy is busy, and we’ve probably got manpower, they could assist them, and likewise,” Carney said. “Really, that’s the benefit of it to everybody county wide.”
Hamilton County 911 employs more than 130 telecommunicators, according to its website, and it answers between 2,000 and 2,500 calls on average each day.
The decision has been in the works for months, according to Soddy-Daisy City Manager Burt Johnson. Soddy-Daisy paying the county to handle its 911 calls, he said, will be more cost-effective for the city over time.
“We reduce administrative overhead and eliminate redundant infrastructure costs, which could be $300,000 to $500,000 every three to five years,” he said. “These savings can be reinvested into public safety, training and essential services that directly benefit our residents.”
Soddy-Daisy does not yet have a plan to educate its residents on Hamilton County’s non-emergency line artificial intelligence call handling, Johnson said, but it plans to educate the public.
“Evelyn, the AI call taking on the nonemergency line, allows us to focus on those emergency lines,” Carney said, “which, again, is the one thing that we’re statutorily required to do, the one thing that we try to do as best as possible, because that’s what people really deserve.”
(READ MORE: Chattanooga Knows: When was 911 service established in Chattanooga?)
Eddie Phillips, vice chair of the board of directors for the 911 center, said Hamilton County 911 is one of a handful of nationally certified dispatch centers within the state.
“I know that they are so dedicated, and they do such a good job, because I do know that they save a lot of lives, and they deliver a lot of babies, and that’s kind of what we’re in business to do,” Phillips said. “Save lives and deliver babies, you know?”
After the news conference, Soddy-Daisy Police Chief Billy Petty, who began his career in Soddy-Daisy’s dispatch room, said that while his heart wanted to keep the city’s dispatch, the time for it had passed. The town used to be the best-kept secret in the Southeast, he said, but it’s not anymore.
“I never thought there’d be 15,000 people in total,” he said. “There are people there we don’t know, and I mean, we’re happy to have them, but like everything else, you didn’t ride your horse and buggy down here today for this press conference.”
After Hamilton County absorbs Soddy-Daisy’s dispatching, the Lookout Mountain Police Department will be the only department within the county to retain its own telecommunicators.
The town’s fire and police chief, Dale Taylor, said by phone that there are no plans to move the dispatch center.
Contact breaking news reporter Mason Edwards at medwards@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6409.