[T]he executive director of the Enhanced 911 board announced he will retire this week, and the board will hand over most of his duties to a consultant for the next six months.
David Tucker, who has been the E-911 director since 2011, said in an interview Monday that he decided to retire after working 30 years for the state. Tucker, 61, said he would take the summer off and play more golf.
Michael Smith, a former secretary of the Agency of Administration under Gov. Jim Douglas, accepted a six-month, $70,000 consulting contract and will start in the next few days. Smith will examine staffing and call volumes, and assist the interim executive director with day-to-day management issues.
Barbara Neal, the emergency community training coordinator, has been tapped as the interim executive director. Neal made $54,394 in 2014; Tucker made $93,778.
Smith will be responsible for developing a process to recruit and hire a new executive director. He will need to prepare a report for the E-911 board about how emergency telephone services should be organized in Vermont, and what models “could result in efficiencies.”
Smith recently served as interim president at Burlington College, helping to broker a land sale at the financially strapped school.
Tucker said officials have been discussing organizational structures for some time. This year, there are twin bills in the House and Senate to put the independent E-911 board under the aegis of the Department of Public Safety. Neither of those bills has moved out of committee.
Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux, chair of the E-911 board, said the quasi-independent board opposed the move to public safety.
Marcoux approached the Shumlin administration about offering a contract to Smith a few weeks ago after Tucker announced his retirement. Smith was the chair of the E-911 board in 2001, and Marcoux said he was hired to analyze the governance issue and the PSAP consolidation question from an independent perspective.
Lawmakers have asked the E-911 board to submit a comprehensive report about the the ideal structure for Public Safety Answering Points and E-911 call centers by Sept. 1.
The report will outline how many PSAPs are needed, how many call seats are needed, how much they cost, and what kind of organizational structure will “optimize performance and cost effectiveness to meet Vermont’s needs.”
“That’s a big public policy question,” Tucker said Monday. “Somebody has got to have the time to analyze that and determine the best course.”
Smith was the state president of FairPoint Communications for three-and-a-half years after leaving the Douglas administration and started consulting for WCAX-TV as a Republican political analyst more than a year ago.
The state awarded FairPoint an $11.2 million contract to build a new E-911 system on Nov. 5, and the system is scheduled to go live July 31. Smith, whose contract ends in October, said he will not involve himself in any matters concerning FairPoint in order to avoid any perceived conflicts of interest.
“They wanted me to look at what’s the most effective and efficient way (to deliver E-911 services),” Smith said of the board. “I know this area, E-911, and I just thought it’s something that I’ve done before.”
The board has fielded two service outages in six months from two different companies, and Tucker came under fire for an incomplete report on implementing the Enhanced 911 system in schools.
Following a 40-minute service outage on Aug. 6, Tucker said he would bring the FCC into an investigation of Intrado Inc., which had been handling the state’s Next Generation 911 system. By November, the state awarded a five-year E-911 contract to FairPoint, whose call forwarding system then failed over Thanksgiving weekend.
An original estimate of the number of lost 911 calls during the outage was about 100.
On Jan. 20, Tucker was called on by the Senate Committee on Institutions to submit a report on how to bring technology into schools so that each school’s location would show up on an operating system when someone dialed 911 from inside the building. The report was funded with a $10,000 appropriation in the 2014 capital spending bill. Tucker told VTDigger in January that he had simply not completed the required report.
Instead, Tucker submitted a two-page letter saying “it is clear that more work needs to be done,” and the board would “continue to support voluntary compliance.” Sen. Dick Mazza, D-Grand Isle, said Monday that Tucker’s failure to produce the report was “disappointing.”
