Officials respond to new breakdown of E911 data

Mar. 21—OSKALOOSA — City and county officials sought answers Monday about the seemingly conflicted statistics from the joint city-county EMA-E911 evaluation, and in the meantime, officials are continuing to move forward in their efforts to put the Mahaska County E911 Center under City of Oskaloosa control.

The Mahaska County Board of Supervisors updated the community about the issue at their regular meeting Monday morning. The conflict in question is between two different methodologies for analyzing the percentage breakdown of calls that the Mahaska County E911 Center receives. The analysis seeks to compare the number of calls for City of Oskaloosa first responders compared to calls for the rest of the county.

The evaluation performed by Resource Management Associates used a geographical grid methodology to analyze the numbers and attributes 77% of the center's calls to Oskaloosa. New data from the center, obtained by the Herald using a public information request, breaks down the calls by agency and attributes only 49% of the city's calls to Oskaloosa.

Groenendyk told attendees of the board's meeting that RMA briefed the county supervisors, city officials and first responders, including Mahaska County Emergency Management Administrator Jamey Robinson, Mahaska County Sheriff Russ Van Renterghem and Oskaloosa Chief of Police Ben Boeke about what their public report regarding the findings of the evaluation would say.

"They literally displayed their presentation of what they thought was accurate information during that time," Groenendyk said. "For the next two or three weeks, if any individual there thought there was misinformation, they should get a hold of them and let them know."

Groenendyk told attendees RMA received the information they used in their report from Robinson and expressed confusion about why the numbers "keep changing."

"So the numbers keep changing — you don't blame Resource Management. It has to go back to the source of the information," Groenendyk said. "There was a two or three week period in there, where Resource Management was basing their decision on information that was given to them by the 911 director or EMA director, however you want to look at it ... It is a little bit puzzling to me how, now we're getting different numbers, and we want to blame Resource Management for not giving us a proper response. They gave us a proper response. It was based on the information given to them by the proper people."

RMA submitted a memo to the Oskaloosa City Council responding to the breakdown by agency, published in the Oskaloosa Herald on March 10. Their response stated that they stand by their original report "without qualification" and that when they were performing their evaluation, they were told that a call breakdown by agency was not possible with the center's Computer Aided Dispatch, or CAD, system.

The city council voted to file the memo.

Robinson cleared up some of the confusion surrounding the statistics at the Oskaloosa City Council regular meeting Monday night, when he spoke during the public comment session at the beginning of the meeting.

"Just to clarify some things: the new numbers I sent out ... weren't taking away from the 77 percent of the calls for service that are generated in the City of Oskaloosa," he said. "The only correction that we made was going back and working with our CAD provider and making it so that we could break out the numbers a little better. So, 77 percent of the calls are generated within the City of Oskaloosa. All we did was take it further to see who generates those calls within the city of Oskaloosa."

Robinson explained that prior to working with the center's CAD provider, the system logged activities performed by the sheriff's department within the City of Oskaloosa as calls generated by the City of Oskaloosa.

"I know in the memo they said we should have provided that unsolicited," Robinson said. "We didn't have it at the time when RMA was here on site."

Robinson said he began working with the center's CAD vendor to obtain that information later.

"No one used to ask for these numbers," Robinson said. "We'll gladly produce these numbers, but no one had ever asked for them. So as we've kind of gone through this and started working on a monthly report ... that was one of the reports that stood out, is how can we break this down to show which numbers are which within the different entities."

Groenendyk told attendees of the morning's supervisors meeting that the board of supervisors is moving forward with the efforts to put the E911 center under city control under Boeke's direction.

"If things move forward and we can get a contract together, [911] will be under the elected people of the city council of Oskaloosa," Groenendyk said. "I have full confidence in Chief Boeke. He's a very IT, tech-savvy individual. He speaks well, I think he understands the CAD system ... At least there will be somebody to hold accountable if things are not done properly."

Groenendyk said the RMA included measures that would need to be taken to protect Mahaska County's political subdivisions "if things go wrong."

Robinson says the E911 center will continue to provide excellent service to the community no matter which entity it is placed under.

"As long as we can retain the staff that are there, 911 will continue to flourish in Mahaska County for everybody," Robinson said.

Channing Rucks can be reached at crucks@oskyherald.com.