Comms board status toggled

SANDPOINT — Bonner County is changing the frequency of the Bonner County Communications Advisory Board.

The county commission unanimously adopted a resolution Tuesday to make the advisory committee on public safety communications an ad hoc committee, which will only meet on an as-needed basis or at the direction of the commission.

BCCAB was formed in 2011 and created to oversee the Bonner County Interoperability Communication Advisory Board. The board was formed to advise and provide clarity regarding public safety communications and attendant infrastructure. The commission contends the advisory board has served its purpose and the communications system and infrastructure has been sufficiently developed.

Marcus Robbins, the county’s deputy director of technology and public safety communications manager, said BCCAB helped determine where grant funding would make meaningful improvements to the system and guide decisions on interoperability.

BCCAB, for instance, aided law enforcement’s migration from ultrahigh frequency to very high frequency, the band on which other public safety disciplines communicated on.

“The switch to VHF made it possible for everybody to be interoperable,” said Robbins.

However, the commission also notes in the list of whereases that “meetings have been sporadic and poorly attended and general lacking in its original intent, no longer serving in an advisory capacity.”

The move follows an August meeting which was quite well attended and involved a spirited discussion about the possibility of charging dispatching fees to municipal police forces, fire districts and emergency medical service providers who rely on the system.

The commission and its legal counsel determined that the county has been improperly subsidizing labor costs for the dispatch center for years, which is contrary to state law. Phone user taxes are collected to fund the hardware side of public safety communications, while system users are responsible for kicking in on staffing the dispatch center, according to the county’s interpretation of Idaho Code.

The county has not decided whether it will ultimately impose dispatching fees. Other options include establishing a regional dispatch center with neighboring counties or system users creating their own dispatching apparatuses.

The prospect of dispatching fees attracted an estimated 50 people to the August meeting. City officials from Sandpoint, Ponderay and Priest River raised concerns that fees would force them to cut back on staffing. The meeting included tense exchanges between Commissioner Dan McDonald and former Commissioner Mike Nielsen. The latter urged the county not to welsh on an agreement previous county commissioners made to cover staffing costs when the county took over public safety communications for the whole county, while the former argued that the future boards could not be bound by the decisions of its predecessors, especially when those decisions are incompatible with state law.

Nielsen contends the county is downgrading the role of BCCAB because it is unable withstand the heat it took at the August BCCAB meeting.

“Rather than meet to discuss communications problems, it appears the BOCC has chosen to effectively disband BCCAB,” Nielsen said in an email.

Meanwhile, ongoing public safety communications issues are at risk of not being addressed, according to Nielsen. Those issues include representation of Priest Lake on the board, dispatchers speaking in low tones or not closely enough to the microphone, and garbled transmissions.

Nielsen also takes issue with the commission’s decision to consider collecting dispatch fees from other taxing districts, while baking in raises to their salaries in its recently adopted budget.

McDonald disputes that the August meeting was the impetus for converting BCCAB to an ad hoc committee.

“It has nothing to do with last month’s meeting. It has everything to do with a lack of participation from the various members, the lack of agenda issues and the fact that over the last year they have only had three out of the 12 meetings because of the lack of business. Those meetings were poorly attended and I believe at least on of the three didn’t even have a quorum,” McDonald said in an email.

Keith Kinnaird can be reached by email at kkinnaird@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow him on Twitter @KeithDailyBee.