E911 board members begin voting again

    The Emergency 911 Services and Communications boards held a joint meeting Thursday night, at which it was announced that four of the five members of the E911 board that had refrained from voting since the early part of this year would begin voting again. The five member towns that had abstained from voting on the E911 board were Kalona, Riverside, Ainsworth, Wellman and West Chester. 

    West Chester did not regain its voting membership because it does not meet the state?s criterion, which is to have its own public safety agency, such as a fire department. West Chester has contracted with the Wellman Fire Department for fire protection, so West Chester receives representation through Wellman.

    The decision to have five of the nine members refrain from voting grew out of a fear of new administrative rules for board membership enacted at the state level. County attorney Barb Edmondson told the E911 board that five of the members may no longer qualify for voting rights under the new state rules and recommended that they abstain from voting until the rules could be changed.

    Leonard Koehnen, a consulting engineer out of St. Paul, Minn., gave a PowerPoint presentation to the boards concerning a possible future facility for the communications center.

    The way dispatch centers are run and even constructed has changed considerably in the last few decades, said Koehnen. He said he wants to make sure Washington has a dispatch center that is up-to-date.

    ?Dispatch areas are now designed to be a pleasant area to combat long periods of work, stress and boredom,? said Koehnen. ?We?ve come a long way in understanding the stressfulness of the job.?

    Koehnen said that dispatch areas are now outfitted with windows, which was uncommon decades ago.

    ?No one would have thought of putting windows in dispatch centers 20 years ago,? said Koehnen. ?They were NORAD-style bunkers.?

    Koehnen also touched on the issue of moving the tower at the communications building. He said that the tower is in violation of a number of federal laws but, because of its age, has been ?grandfathered in? without the need to comply with new regulations. However, he said that if the tower were moved, it would lose its exemptions and all of the state and federal regulations governing towers would be enforced.

    ?You can?t build a tower in a migratory bird area,? said Koehnen. ?You can?t build it on an Indian burial ground. It?s really hard to build a tower these days.?  

For the full story, see the Nov. 2 edition of The Washington Evening Journal