This commentary is by Kimberly B. Cheney of Montpelier, former Vermont attorney general, former Washington County state’s attorney, former chair of the Vermont Labor Relations Board, and former member of the Montpelier School Board and chair of the Montpelier Planning Commission.
By 2006, the idea of creating a regional public safety authority for central Vermont was germinating in the Chamber of Commerce and citizens in various municipalities in the region.
Disputes over dispatching for the towns were getting acrimonious. Citizens concluded that the economic health of the region, as well as the safety of residents, depended on “an affordable, integrated, efficient system of public safety services (fire, police, ambulance, and dispatch) that protects the public welfare and provides rapid responses with highly qualified personnel when emergency situations arise ”
After eight years of give and take, extensive discussions and negotiations among interested people and political leaders, a system to meet the stated goals was created. In 2014 a new municipality, the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority was created by act of the Legislature and approved by the governor.
Its governing charter is multi-pages that spells out the authority’s governance process. Stripped of all complexities, the authority would be governed by a board of directors and managed by an executive director akin to a city manager. The charter would have to be expressly approved by each member municipality. The authority then could — after a lengthy process involving the public, but without the express approval of member cities and towns — require each member to include funds to be assessed on its grand list to implement the budget voted by the authority board.
Unfortunately, hostility to the authority was prenatal. In Berlin, volunteer firefighters and police convinced the selectboard not to put a proposal to join the authority on the ballot. In Barre Town, they were instrumental in defeating a ballot item to join.
So, the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority began life with Barre and Montpelier as its only members. No other municipalities have become full members of the authority.
It is governed by a volunteer seven-member board serving staggered terms consisting of two directors appointed by each city and three at-large directors who serve three-year terms, elected by the combined vote of the two cities. A cost-sharing formula required Barre to pay 53% of the budget and Montpelier 47% (based on population).
None of the surrounding towns represented by Capital Fire Mutual Aid System, nor the mutual aid system itself, ever became members, although they did contract and pay for dispatching services that supplemented the city budgets.
I was appointed an at-large director in 2014 and elected three times thereafter. My first experience with regionalization was in 1967 when I heard Gov. Philip Hoff speak to a crowd on the steps of Central Vermont Hospital to celebrate a triumph of community achievement by closing the small hospitals in Barre and Montpelier and merging them into an effective organization for the future.
Regretfully, the Public Safety Authority had a different life than the hospital. It is now on life support. Both cities have voted to withdraw from the authority. The board voted to dissolve the authority, but there is a question of the validity of that vote.
However that is resolved, the voters who created the authority have a final say on both issues. I hope they reject it. In the past, they have been unfailingly supportive of the authority and approved its budgets by large majorities.
Fear of losing control
Why are fire and police organizations so hostile? Reasons may be hard to pin down. Wisdom teaches, “The stated reason is never the real reason,” and there are many stated reasons. I distill them down to one: fear of losing control of their areas of authority to another public board.
Many years earlier, the Vermont Supreme Court in Buttolph v. Osborn rejected a bid by opponents to stop a town from closing an underperforming high school and tuitioning its students to another town. The court characterized the inherent problem preventing regionalization as “the fierce democracy of the towns” which, the opinion states, arises out of a fear of losing local control. It is an endemic feature of Vermont life.
Add to this the sometimes legitimate concern of police and fire organizations that they will be unjustly criticized by the public that, as former Montpelier Police Chief Brian Peete told me, are long on opinions about running police departments but short of experience.
Police and fire work is often in the public domain, sometimes life-threatening, often requiring instant action without time to process alternatives, action that is hard to justly evaluate later in a public forum. It is not surprising that they seek direction from experienced leaders who understand them, their culture, the changing technology, and pressure of budgets, all of which control their lives.
Notwithstanding these cultural factors, both the Barre and Montpelier fore chiefs refused to join the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority board. Their presence could have mediated cultural conflict while providing much-needed technical expertise. The Barre fire chief asserted doing so was a conflict of interest, as any money taken by the authority would diminish their existing city budgets. I expect this attitude was supported by city managers who also refused to consider joining the authority’s board.
Central Vermont Public Safety Authority bears some responsibility. It moved too quickly in 2018 to create a single dispatch facility that would have resulted in closing those operated by the cities and transferring their personnel to the authority working out of a new facility. At that time, the authority had no functioning command structure. Nor was there any “crisis” articulated by the board to mobilize public demand for change. No strong public opinion emerged that would have encouraged the city councils to transfer dispatching control to a new entity.
This effort did, however, have one benefit. The threat of regionalization motivated the two cities’ fire and police leaders to talk to each other about common issues and to consider improvement. Before that, the colloquial expression was that the cities were completely separated and it was impossible to cross the “drawbridge” between them. But they came together to support a dedicated communications link between both headquarters and discussed common problems.
Radio communications
But there actually was (and still is) a significant problem threatening the functioning of public safety response in the region. The entire radio communications infrastructure serving the cities and the surrounding towns is obsolete, lacks proper maintenance, is inefficient and nearing the end of technological life. The cities funded their own police communications on separate frequencies, which worked well.
But fire and emergency medical services radio infrastructure, which might have functioned satisfactorily, was compromised because the radio frequency is shared with the Capital Fire Mutual Aid System towns, and other users poach. Often undisciplined “chatter,” including Canadian taxi dispatch on that frequency, overloaded it. Added to this were aging equipment, channel overload, and dead spots.
These factors compromised all the region’s communication services. The dispatchers’ usually fine work was compromised. The inadequacy of the entire radio infrastructure was a greater problem than dispatching itself. In response, the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority stepped in. It raised funds to retain a nationally known consulting firm to identify all existing equipment, assess the existing technology infrastructure, recommend organization and technical solutions, and estimate the cost of bringing the system up to date.
The public safety authority hired a firm, Televate, to fully identify the problems and suggest solutions. It issued a report in August 2021. The cost to upgrade the system was estimated to cost $6.5 million. The cost was simply too great for any one entity to bear, especially because many municipalities benefited.
Although Televate urged the public safety authority to construct a governance system for a regional effort with a formula to apportion costs, first responders resisted. Instead, two cities proposed they should individually pay for their own upgrades and requested that the city of Montpelier, rather than the public safety authority, adopt the Televate technology plan and fashion a way to fund it. That way, each would retain dispatching revenue from contracts with the towns. Everyone would find their own lifeboats.
The public safety authority board chair acquiesced by declining to hire an executive director and scrapping a plan for a regional approach.
Life was breathed into the city plan when in 2022 the Vermont Department of Public Safety secured state funding of $11 million to bolster local regional dispatch centers to cope with a crisis in the statewide dispatching and the 911 system, including almost 100 towns that were provided free dispatching. This arrangement was so complex and stressful that dispatchers were quitting, causing the system to operate at near 50% vacancy levels, putting more stress on those that remained.
The department wanted to shed its local responsibilities and concentrate on 911, its own police, and other state agencies. If work could be shifted to local agencies, it would solve many state problems. Another $9 million in earmarks is now expected to be available in 2023.
Once there was a discussion of the possibility of “free money” being available to solve central Vermont local communications, interest in the public safety authority evaporated. The city of Montpelier filed a grant request, proposing the region manage as it always had rather than implementing a new governance system, or adopting public safety authority governance. The two cities would fund their own needs.
The city would get the money and distribute it to the Capital Fire Mutual Aid System free from public meeting and records law. The state Department of Public Safety conditionally approved a grant for about $2.5 million (nearly $1million was rejected as not eligible), conditioned on a governance plan being created. There was no plan for funding the shortfall, except vendor (Motorola) funding.
As of today, little of that money is actually flowing while the Legislature grapples with how governance and funding of the shift to local control will be managed. Critically, a plan for state aid to local entities to relieve the property tax is also required to make the system viable.
In my opinion, the voters should not agree to allow Central Vermont Public Safety Authority to be dissolved and the cities should not be allowed to withdraw. The public safety authority charter, perhaps with some needed amendments, is an excellent vehicle for constructing a regional system, which is the future of public safety communications.
