Emanuel administration defends emergency dispatcher reductions

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Updated: October 24, 2011 8:25PM

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to reduce the ranks of police and fire dispatchers will neither slow response times to 911 calls nor increase employee burn-out, a top mayoral aide insisted Monday, but some aldermen remained fearful.

Testifying at City Council budget hearings, Gary Schenkel, executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, argued that it makes more sense to build in $3.2 million in annual overtime — roughly $8,000-per- employee — than to hire more dispatchers at a cost of $120,000-a-year per-employee in salary and benefits.

“We are not anticipating any degradation of service,” Schenkel said, predicting that the average 911 call would continue to be answered in three rings.

“We have historical data that will allow us to schedule to the peak periods and peak times that historically we get a greater call volume. It’s almost like a bell curve as to when it starts to escalate and when it starts to drop off. Same throughout the year. As you hit the summer months, that bell curve starts going up. Then, as we hit the cooler weather after the holidays and the festivals, we start ramping down.”

Fire dispatcher Jeff Johnson, union steward for IBEW Local 9, has argued that the mayor’s plan to eliminate the jobs of 17 fire dispatchers, lay off nine others and shrink the supervisory ranks from 13 to 8 could send response times and employee burn-out rates through the roof.

The jobs of 45 police dispatchers would be eliminated. So would four of 22 radio repair technicians at a time when radio and data frequencies need to be reprogrammed to comply with a Federal Communications Commission mandate.

During Monday’s hearing, several aldermen voiced similar concerns. Ald. Mary O’Connor (41st) went so far as to read a statement from a constituent warning of “overwhelming” burn-out by dispatchers already stretched to the limit.

Then, she added her own commentary: “It’s a very stressful job. The majority of cuts are from the front-line workers. And now they’re getting burned out. In the last two years, when they started cutting back, they thought eventually there’d be a light at the end of the tunnel. Now, you’re continuing to cut back.”

Schenkel countered, “Whether we have 110 percent staffing or 50 percent staffing, we always run that risk of making a mistake. That adds to the stress. I’m certainly not negating that.”

But, he argued that a 15 percent absenteeism rate in some sections of the 911 center floor has exacerbated the need for overtime, prompting a handful of dispatchers to double their annual salaries in overtime.

“If I could get those 41 people back to work, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this situation,” he said.