Grappling with questions about control and minority employment, planners are trying to resolve the fate of Evansville-Vanderburgh County Central Dispatch in a proposed consolidated government.
It looked as if a proposal had been forwarded on May 27, when a subcommittee of the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Reorganization Committee recommended consolidation of the Evansville Police Department and the Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Office into a single agency under the sheriff's direction.
The motion the four-member public safety subcommittee approved that day included a provision to make Central Dispatch — a jointly funded agency governed by a city-county advisory board — a division of the Sheriff's Office.
But after hearing objections in a meeting last week, subcommittee members suspended judgment until they could talk to Central Dispatch Director Jo Anne Smith. No meeting has been scheduled.
Smith, who was promoted from the deputy director position by the advisory board in 2005, said she can work under the sheriff if asked to do so, "as long as my people are not constricted from doing their jobs."
"But we're not broke," she said. "We don't need to be fixed."
There are other objections.
When subcommittee members began kicking around the idea of filling the Central Dispatch advisory board with Police Department and Sheriff's Office representatives last week, Evansville Fire Chief Keith Jarboe pleaded with them not to embark on a path that could diminish his department's influence.
Jarboe said his continued presence on the Central Dispatch board helps provide balance. He pointed out that the majority of fire service runs, all of which go through Central Dispatch, are of the highest response priority.
"The advisory board is already a consolidated board, so I don't understand why we would want to take a board that was consolidated to be more efficient and move it under a particular department," he said. "There's a potential ... for the Fire Department to lose the type of influence we need to help make decisions on how Central Dispatch is operated."
Subcommittee members — including 911 dispatcher Kurt Jourdan, who offered the original motion to transfer responsibility for Central Dispatch to the Sheriff's Office — said they are open to discussing Jarboe's concerns.
Minority representation
But Smith will have other questions to answer when she speaks to the public safety subcommittee.
The Rev. Adrian Brooks Sr., the subcommittee's chairman, said he had referred minority employment candidates to Central Dispatch, but the agency still employs no blacks among its 28 dispatchers and nine other workers. There are three vacancies for which hiring has begun.
"If there's no minority representation, the sucker ain't working," Brooks said.
The subcommittee members — Brooks, Jourdan, Barbara Harris and H. Ray Hoops — and law enforcement and fire officials discussed Central Dispatch's hiring practices, but acknowledged they didn't have the answers.
"The right person (Smith) is not here, the one who can provide us with clarity," Brooks said.
Smith acknowledged Central Dispatch has had just one black employee, an office manager, since the 1988 city-county agreement creating the consolidated Central Dispatch operation. A black woman was hired as a dispatcher several years ago, Smith said, but she did not complete training.
Smith said she and the Central Dispatch board would like to hire minority employees, but none have been able to make it through a rigorous, multistep hiring procedure that includes extensive national and local criminal records checks, a computerized skills test, personal interview, polygraph test and drug and medical screening.
More than 100 people applied for two openings last year, Smith said, calling the proportion typical.
"Our standards are so high, because not only do we hold the lives of public safety officers in our hands, but we hold in our hands the lives of every citizen in this county and every person that passes through this county," she said.
Another problem is the relatively low proportion of applicants who are black, Smith said.
"You don't get the minority applications, or you don't get the qualified minority applications," she said. "You can't hire what you don't have."
Smith pointed to the fact that 29 of her employees are women.
"We really don't care anything about sex and race," she said. "We're just trying to get the best person."