Dispatch expands stations, staff
By DAVE CALDWELL, Staff Writer, dcaldwell@minotdailynews.comArticle Photos
The expansion of Minot Central Dispatch might be just a bit of a misnomer, as the physical room where the dispatchers are located at the Minot Police Department is not actually growing.
But then again, it is.
Currently, with the larger, older, bulkier equipment and furniture in place, there is room for only three workstations, meaning only three dispatchers can be on duty at one time.
"We do need more room, but we're going from three to five (workstations)," said Capt. Steve Kukowski, the department's support commander. "With three, that's all we can handle right now. Sometimes the workload requires more than that. So adding a fourth one will help and a fifth will be great with the expansion."
Capt. Al Hanson, the department's operations commander, said that four workstations will be located in the same general area, while the fifth will be nearby, designed to be used by the Public Safety Answering Point Manager a civilian supervisor who will likely be hired in the coming months. The PSAP manager will be able to manage day-to-day operations in addition to being able to man an actual dispatch station from that same desk in time of need. The PSAP manager position is still awaiting approval by the city's civil service department and will hopefully be advertised in the next 30 to 60 days, according to Hanson. The county commission has already voted to allocate $60,000 per year to fund the position.
"We have a good staff now in dispatch," Kukowski said. "And it's a full staff. That's why we're looking at this manager. With 12 employees working 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, there's a lot of scheduling things. We're not here all the time, so they need to have a chain of command so they can get their schedules worked out so that the community is taken care of."
"The new furniture will be ergonomically correct as well," Hanson said. "So if you want to sit at the station, you can. If you want to stand, it will actually move up to a height that you can stand and work at your workstation.
"The dispatchers did have a lot of input in how they wanted that to sit."
After all, keeping the dispatchers comfortable might be the biggest key in the whole process. They are the people who make the things happen that society takes for granted every day. They make the fire truck come when there's smoke, they send police and ambulance when they get a report of a bad automobile accident.
"It's often been described as 95 percent calm and 5 percent sheer panic," Hanson said. "That's kind of the way the room is you've got to be that type of person that you can throw a switch. You'll be sitting there doing your normal thing and all of the sudden all hell breaks loose, and you've got to go into panic mode and deal with it.
"Not that you're panicking you're being professional and things are getting done and everything gets done but then you kick back into the, 'OK, everything's fine, nothing happened' mode. That's the way it has to be."
Kukowski, Hanson and White all agreed emphatically that unlike in the earlier days of just phone calls to the station, the job is now so specialized that it is no more likely that an officer could do a dispatcher's job than it is that a dispatcher could take a patrol car out and do an officer's job.
"It can't be just a body filling the spot," Kukowski added. "We can't take a patrolman and stick him in there, and tell them, 'you're going to be a dispatcher' like we did when we started. It's way too sophisticated and complicated for that. You need to have somebody who knows how to operate every piece of equipment very efficiently and accurately.
"They're like a tactical team. They're their own unit, and they operate independently within themselves."
