Kalispell mayor Tammi Fisher recently sent the 911 center’s board a letter questioning, among other things, the wisdom of a board with an even number of members; board meetings held during the day instead of the evening, and; the amount of information posted on the 911 center’s website. She was right to do so, and frankly it’s high time that these issues were raised. There’s the appearance of some dysfunction, and the inability to keep directors more than a year or two is a red flag that cannot be ignored.
Unifying 911 functions was, and still is, a good idea, as was building a new 911 center. Now the Flathead must build an administrative structure for the 911 center, for emergency services, that operates smoothly, transcends provincial disputes between towns, and provides an environment in which the turnover in directors is low.
One solution is making 911 a department of Flathead County’s sheriff’s office, dispensing with the board, and funding the operation through a tax. That’s a solution worth considering, although the municipalities of Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls, probably would not embrace it with great enthusiasm, if they embraced it at all. That solution does not preclude an advisory board, which should be broadly based to obviate the insularity that attends boards comprising almost exclusively constables and firefighters.
Meetings should be moved to the evening, and that can and should start now.
I’m agnostic on whether the 911 website needs major changes. At the moment, it presents information that OES officials want the public to have — but it may not present some classes of information that the public needs and wants. I think there’s merit in having the website, and the communications context in which it exists, reviewed by experts, and not just by experts within the OES community and its friends.
In a major emergency, incidentally, one in which electricity is out and the internet is down, the 911 website won’t be of much use. Local radio is virtually the only source of information in that situation, but with automation and the decay of local radio’s news gathering abilities, local radio is no longer a very good source of information. That would need to be addressed in a communications review.