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While officials continue efforts to create a single 911 dispatch system in Salt Lake County, Weber and Morgan counties have resolved the issue.
Their two dozen public-safety agencies will use a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system supplied by Spillman Technologies, a Salt Lake City company that also will provide records management, a program for managing the jail and software for mobile communications.
The cost was not disclosed.
"We wanted to have access to more information with less work," said Tina Scarlet, executive director of the Weber Area Dispatch 911 and Emergency Services District.
Up to now, Weber Area 911 did not have an integrated system that allowed various agencies to communicate or share records easily, she said, often resulting in slower responses to calls and the duplication of data entries.
"Any time there was a need to enter information, the same information had to be entered two or three times," Scarlet said in a news release about Spillman's selection.
The new system will make Weber Area 911 the single contact point and site of data storage for all of the police, sheriff, fire and correctional agencies in the two counties.
For more than a year now, Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams has led a charge to consolidate the two 911 dispatch systems operating in the valley. He persuaded the County Council to set aside $1.4 million to select a single system, to buy the appropriate software to implement it and then to train people to use it.
Legislators later provided another $2 million to resolve the problem as quickly as possible to avoid heartbreaking stories of people dying while waiting too long for help because their 911 call got bounced around between dispatch centers.
The consolidation effort cleared one hurdle in August, when Salt Lake City and the Valley Emergency Communications Center (VECC) signed an interlocal agreement to pick a consultant to help them unify.
Salt Lake City uses one system, along with the Unified Police Department and Sandy, provided by a company called Versaterm. This system handles about 70 percent of all emergency calls, county officials have said.
The rest of the valley's public safety agencies are part of VECC, whose system is made by Spillman Technologies.
VECC Executive Director John Inch Morgan said Wednesday that an advisory board representing various agencies expects to pick the consultant by Nov. 17. The consultant then will have 60 days to come up with detailed information that will shape the form of a "request for proposal" for a unified dispatch system.
"First they'll identify the potential cost to each agency for a new [system], identify resources to cover those costs and then help us with putting the RFP together," Inch Morgan said. "And we don't just want to look at computer-aided dispatch. We're having the consultant look at everything — records-management systems, mobile data, maybe alerting systems."
There could be a wide range of costs, he said, noting that if the RFP process selects either Spillman Technologies or Versaterm, "half of the valley will have to convert to the other. And if a third party is selected, then both will have to change."
Inch Morgan said Weber Area 911's decision to go with Spillman Technologies will not impact the selection process in Salt Lake County. Spillman officials say it should.
In their new release, they noted that 20 of Utah's 29 county sheriff's offices are on the Spillman system, as are 70 percent of law enforcement agencies in the state. Overall, they said, their products are used by 1,200 public-safety agencies nationwide.
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