Last Tuesday, the moment finally arrived when St. Francois County, using Perry County’s equipment, took over dispatching services for the county and by Thursday, a Perryville resident posted on Facebook about an emergency call that hadn’t been answered by dispatch.
What resulted was a hoot ‘n’ holler on Facebook, which quickly caught the attention of city and county officials. It wasn’t long until the Republic-Monitor was contacted by Perry County Sheriff Jason Klaus, who wanted to issue a statement on the reported “non-answered 911 call.”
Sheriff’s statement
He said, “This morning the Perry County Sheriff's Office and Perry County Administration were notified of an online posting concerning a non-answered 911 call to St. Francois County dispatch. We are currently looking into that. We want to make sure and reassure all our citizens that we are working hard to make sure that these are few and far between. Unfortunately, every system still relies upon 911 cellphone coverage for these calls to go through and be accurate.
“Our 911 system changed over on Tuesday at 10 a.m. and since that time, we have experienced a few minor issues — setbacks that have been quickly resolved by working with our teams at both Perry County, the City of Perryville, and St. Francis County. At this time, we feel very confident in the switchover that our officers are receiving all of the calls for service, and that they will be responding to everything as is, whether that dispatch centers in St. Francois County or Perry County.”
A look back
Since October of last year, the proposal to merge Perry County’s 911 service with the St. Francois County Joint Communications Center has been a controversial one. Citizens attended public meetings where many voiced their objection to the merger, believing that Perry County already had an excellent 911 and feared that losing control of it would result in less reliable and slower response times, not to mention the loss of local jobs.
On Dec. 18, 2024, the Perry County Commission signed an agreement to merge 911 operations with St. Francois County over the objections of many local residents, law enforcement personnel and other first responders.
By January, the objections turned into a petition seeking to put the issue to a public vote. In an effort to make that happen, opponents of the planned merger circulated it in the hope that enough signatures would be collected to make an end run around the commission. However, in April 2024, Perry County voters rejected a half-cent sales tax to help fund 911 dispatch locally, but the tax failed with a vote of 1,567 to 1,364, resulting in the Perry County Commission and City of Perryville continuing their efforts to merge the county’s 911 dispatch with St. Francois County.
Both sides of the matter have been going back and forth every since.
Two meetings
On Thursday afternoon, the Perry County Commission met at 1 p.m. with City of Perryville personnel and then at 2 p.m. with personnel with the City of Perryville and Perry County. Also attending the meeting by video conferencing were Chuck Farr, the deputy director of St. Francois County Joint Communications and Alan Wells, St. Francois County 911 director.
Presiding Commissioner Mike Sauer asked Farr for an update on the 911 switchover.
“So, Tuesday morning, about 9 o'clock, we went ahead and pushed the 911s over to us just to make sure they were, and we started doing some test calls to make sure we were receiving them before the 10 o'clock number that we'd given everybody. We wanted to be ahead of schedule and not behind schedule, as we promised you guys. We did it a little early. At 9:17 we got the first 911 call that was not a test call. It was for a medical emergency that we successfully transferred to Mercy, and that was a big milestone for us. That was very exciting.
“We wanted to make sure all those went through and we had numerous other calls throughout the day with succession. There were no issues with anything, getting those transferred, handling those emergencies. I've been in contact with Police Chief Hunt, Captain Kelly, the sheriff, numerous times a day for the past two days now, just going over things. We’ve been working through different procedures, and everything has run rather smoothly. No big issues. The only thing that we had was last night, at some point, we had a radio mishap, not really a mishap, a hiccup in the system. It was on our equipment here at St. Francois County.”
Contact made
Farr explained that contact had been made with the person who made the Facebook post and information had been gathered from her to help St. Francois County perform an investigation about what happened and help determine a possible cause for the problem. Wells also explained that the investigation would be thorough to make sure the cause was found and then a public comment would be made.
In response to Farr’s and Wells’ report, Presiding Commissioner Sauer sent a message to the public, saying, “If you sustain an issue while knowing dialing 911, Facebook is not the place to post that. Contact the sheriff's department, the county commission, the city manager, the mayor, or somebody like that, let them know you had an issue, so we can fix it instead of bashing everybody up on Facebook.”.
In a nutshell
On Monday of this week, Wells contacted the Republic-Monitor to report on what the investigation had discovered thus far.
“We did all of our investigation, and it looked like there was only one call that we can see was affected,” he said. “I want to stress that it doesn't matter that we're answering the calls here or down there, we're on the same 911 system. So, no matter if it was still there, this incident likely would have happened. The providers told us we could do 10,000 tests and we probably could never get this to happen again.
"It's kind of Murphy's Law. But evidently, that particular call went into the switch system and got pointed to a dead port that was already in the system there. I reiterate that in the wireless world, your call is only as good as your service. If you don't have service, you'll probably never come through the system. That's basically it in a nutshell.”