Hialeah mayor acknowledges city’s 911 falls short in national standards calls response

The City of Hialeah’s 911 Communications Department has been in the spotlight since March, when one of its employees made a plea for help to increase the staff that responds to emergency calls.

When el Nuevo Herald reported that the city’s 911 system failed to answer 4,716 emergency calls as of May 31, Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo Jr. denied the existence of a crisis.

Now, though, the mayor is acknowledging that the emergency unit has deficiencies in its response capacity, answering 83 percent of the calls within 10 seconds and not 90 percent as recommended by Florida’s E911 emergency communications system plan.

In a press conference on Thursday, two days after City Councilman Bryan Calvo spoke publicly on the subject for the second time in a council session, Bovo said the problem is not an exclusive to Hialeah.

The mayor compared his city’s emergency unit to that of Miami-Dade County, which, with a population 10 times larger, has a call response rate of 83.63 percent, according to data he showed to the media.

While Hialeah and Miami-Dade government 911 response rates are similar, other cities in the county like Miami Beach and Aventura not only surpass Hialeah, they also exceed the national standard, at 94.4 percent and 97.7 percent respectively, according to public records obtained by el Nuevo Herald.

Bovo responded that these cities, like Miami, “have systems, and technology, where the call is answered automatically, that helps their numbers. We don’t have that technology right now,” he said. “Although our technology has helped a lot, we went from 60 percent [response rate] before I became mayor to 83 percent this year.”

In a session on Tuesday, Calvo said the city surpassed “the 90 percent mark only after 40 seconds of waiting, leaving many callers waiting much longer before receiving the help they desperately need”.

Last June, the councilman had requested a “formal investigation into the alarming revelations brought to light by two el Nuevo Herald stories” about the 911 emergency line operations, but the mayor ruled out an inquiry into unanswered 911 calls at that time.

A Bovo spokeswoman told el Nuevo Herald at the time that unanswered 911 calls occur in the city, but she emphasized that it is a problem “that occurs everywhere.”

“We know we have 5 percent abandoned calls, but we want to improve that percentage, we want to improve our operations,” said Ismare Monreal, Bovo’s chief of staff.

Is it a 911 staff retention problem?

Hialeah, Miami-Dade’s second most populous city, has 44 employees assigned to the Communications Department, but only 18 are call operators, mostly part-time. According to Bovo, the city needs at least eight more people to fill all the vacancies.

More than five years ago, there was an exodus of 26 employees, which the city has so far been unable to remedy, despite a $5,000 bonus the city government offers to recruit new employees.

Calvo says that raising wages and even offering pensions to 911 employees, a request made by the staffers, is not the only solution to increase staffing and emergency-call response capacity.

The councilman told el Nuevo Herald that one of his proposals is to use available public land in the city, where a new city hall is planned, to build public housing as an incentive not only for 911 personnel, but also for other first respondents such as firefighters and police officers, whose retention in the city has become a problem, according to municipal authorities.

Certification of Hialeah’s 911 employees

Another controversial issue within the 911 operation is the certification of its employees — operators, dispatchers and supervisors, who must be accredited by the Florida Department of Health.

Data provided by Hialeah shows that there are employees in coordination positions and police officers who have never received the certification, in violation of the state statutes.

In other cases, the certification expired 2015, but the staffers continue to perform their functions.

In a statementsto el Nuevo Herald, Bovo indicated that he has “heard this about the certifications. Many of these people are in their certification process. In many cases the people are summoned to take their exam.”

“There are people exempt from those regulations. Obviously, I want to get to the moment where everyone has their updated certification to ensure the credibility of the program, but right now, there is no crisis,” Bovo said.

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