10/28/2001

Isle of Wight County last October said it wanted to create a centralized dispatching center within a year. Twelve months later, officials from Isle of Wight and the Town of Smithfield are still struggling to negotiate a simple detail - who should manage it.
The county's original goal was to eliminate services duplicated by the county and the town, to streamline dispatching and to build a state-of-the-art dispatching center. Politics, pride and financial concerns have slowed these efforts, depending on who is asked.
Whichever the reason, the Isle of Wight Sheriff's Office and the Smithfield Police Department are locked in a positional argument waiting for the other to budge. Neither side says compromise is likely.
The impasse is currently focused on five positions within the present dispatching center - five positions funded by the State Compensation Board. In order for the state to continue funding these positions, worth about $150,000, the sheriff must be responsible for their "hiring, firing and evaluation," according to Bruce Haynes, executive secretary of the State Compensation Board.
Isle of Wight County Sheriff C.W. Phelps is legally bound to meet the "hire, fire and evaluate" criteria. He recently offered to delegate supervision of these five positions to a director for a centralized dispatching center, but he wanted it stipulated that he retains the authority to hire, fire and evaluate.
"I'm not going to sit on a board of directors with eight or nine people and not have a say over people I'm civilly responsible for," Phelps said.
Smithfield's chief of police, Mark A. Marshall, wants Phelps to delegate authority over those positions to a board of directors - without the "hire, fire and evaluate" clause. He argues that the Town of Warrenton and Fauquier County have a similar agreement, and if it works there, it should work here.
"We take the position that the sheriff, in the end, has ultimate authority over those five positions," Marshall said. "What he is agreeing to is that the board (of directors) is going to speak with one unified voice and that he is delegating that power back down to a communications director."
County and town officials, as well as the sheriff and police chief, are scheduling a trip on Nov. 20 to Fauquier County to see its joint dispatching center and to speak with their peers in those localities.
Marshall hopes the trip will sway the sheriff's position.
"Seeing a working operation ... talking with the sheriff, talking with the chief, talking with the communications director, it potentially may allay any fears he has about losing that authority, and we're optimistic that this trip would do that," Marshall said.
The latest meeting of the Centralized Dispatching Committee - a group appointed by the Isle of Wight County Board of Supervisors to create a centralized dispatching system - demonstrated that this conflict has a personal side. Phelps left the meeting after stating that he believed Smithfield objected to a centralized dispatching center because he was involved.
Marshall says that Phelps is personalizing the issue, but Phelps sees no other explanation. The sheriff said he was insulted when Marshall suggested that if the dispatching center were to be constructed at the Isle of Wight Sheriff's Office, Marshall wanted a wall built to offset it from the rest of the building.
"It becomes somewhat personal when the man says he wants to build a wall between me and the dispatching center if it's going to be built up here," Phelps said this week. "Yes, I take that personally."
Marshall says he does not question Phelps' leadership, he simply objects to anyone being in charge of any segment of a joint dispatching center. He wouldn't want any elected official, county official or law enforcement officer in charge of the operation, he said.
Criticisms have been cast at Smithfield, as well. Marshall took offense to a recent statement by Phelps that Smithfield provided flawed information as part of negotiations toward a centralized dispatching center.
"So there is no room for misinterpretation ... there was the allegation that there was incorrect or flawed information that was being delivered and that isn't the case and we certainly refute that," Marshall said. "We have certainly given the information that we have received, in a straight form, back to the committee and back to the sheriff."
There are issues of pride, as well. "There's too much ego involved here," Phelps said. He was referring to Smithfield, but he later said that pride was at play on his side, as well - that giving up the five deputies funded by the Compensation Board would result in the deterioration of his authority and position as sheriff.
The Smithfield Police Department also is hesitant to relinquish control of its dispatching center until it knows that it will be embracing an improvement over the current system.
A stalemate between the two parties could create a problem for the county: Will Isle of Wight County abandon the idea of a centralized dispatching center or will it be forced to sacrifice the $150,000 from the Compensation Board in order to eliminate the debate over the retention of state funding.
Abandoning the goal of centralized dispatching would create new problems. The county and town know that they must upgrade their dispatching systems soon, and there is a huge cost-savings in switching to a single dispatching center rather than each trying to create its own.
The county also will have to determine how it will address four positions it agreed last year to fund for Smithfield's dispatching center. These positions were meant to be a temporary fix for dispatching problems in Smithfield.
Local residents don't care who manages a dispatching center. The primary concern in an emergency, they say, is that someone answer the phone - whether the dispatching center is governed by the county sheriff, the town's police chief, a board of directors or some mixture.
All E-911 calls are currently being fielded by the Sheriff's Office. County deputies relay emergency calls for the Town of Smithfield, the Smithfield Volunteer Fire Department or the county's two rescue squads to Smithfield for dispatching. All other calls - such as for county response or for the five other volunteer fire departments in the county - are dispatched by the Sheriff's Office