Increased increased pay for our 911 operators and that information last year came to us a little bit late and so looking forward to next year.

I thought it would be helpful and beneficial for the council to get Jeff in here to talk to us so we can learn more about exactly what they do and their budget with the understanding that around this table, at least today, we won't be making any decisions, but what we do want to do is just be well informed and have the information necessary so that as we go through our budget for next year we can keep them in consideration.

So with that being said, I will turn things over to Mr.

Carter.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank y'all for having me uh and for listening to this.

What I'm here to do is to ask this council for your help.

You helped your your police and fire to get their pay to where it needed to be to a very fair level, which was a big lift, and we know that was a big lift.

Uh and we knew that was a big lift as you'll see in my presentation uh as we were working through our salaries.

Uh in fact, we were going to do our salary increase uh just before you did your uh police and fire increase, but we saw in doing that we would actually pass the base pay for police at that time.

Uh and we met with Mr.

Roig and uh Mr.

Porter and Chief Chambers and said uh this is where we're going.

We're not going to do this now because we realize that you were working on police and fire pay.

However, this will be coming uh because we've been working on this for four years.

Uh the presentation, I'm sorry I've got it on PowerPoint.

Uh my tech director fortunately is here with a laptop, so maybe I can get it online, but it is in the packet that I gave you along with the number of other documents.

Uh it's under exhibit A, and I'll work through that and that'll hopefully explain our process with this.

Uh another thing for clarification, we always notify our client agencies uh prior to April, prior to April of what their uh cost is going to be for the upcoming fiscal year.

Um and we've done that steadily.

We try for February, but uh we're in the budget process, so in March we're we're really hurrying to get it before April.

So I know the council had questions uh when our telecommunicators came and spoke to them.

Hamilton County 911 was uh founded in 1984.

We are a special government district.

We are not part of Hamilton County government, we're our own municipality, we're organized like a utility.

Uh I guess the comparison would be uh like the wastewater treatment authority with the county, uh, which is uh its own entity or really like uh east side utility or running utility companies is how we're organized.

Um the purpose of 911 districts being established was to uh uh create the infrastructure to where a citizen could call the digits 911 and be connected to the appropriate uh police fire department uh within their jurisdiction, whoever served their jurisdiction.

And that sounds easy, but it was very expensive.

Uh it's very expensive today, it was very expensive in the 80s as well.

Uh so the state in order to uh facilitate 901 being developed across the state, authorized the creation of those 911 districts and gave those districts the authority to uh levy fees on the non on the phone bill uh locally.

That was when everything was landline when it was uh a landline residential or a landline commercial.

And that changed over the years as wireless technology came into effect uh as far as how the fees were handled and today uh the locals cannot set the fee, uh do not manage the fee that is all managed at the state level.

Uh the state gave authority to the districts to do call taking and dispatching with local agreements with interlocal agreements.

It is not a primary responsibility of the 9-1 district to do call taking or dispatching.

That is something that the local districts choose to give to the 9-1-1 districts.

And in order for the 9-1 districts to do that, we must receive funding for that.

The 9-1 funding is specifically for the back back end technology.

We can use it to pay for certain positions, technical positions, administrative positions as necessary to run the service, and we still do that.

Our board is made up of 11 members by state law.

It has to be between nine and 13.

We were nine members for a long time when we unified in 2009.

Increased the size of the board to 11.

There are three, there's a total of five ex officio members of the board.

Three are from the city of Chattanooga.

That includes the mayor or the mayor's representative, which at this time is Daisy Madison, who is the retired CFO for the city.

The police chief chambers and the fire chief, Chief Knowles, or the other two members of the board on uh with the city of Chattanooga.

The county has two ex officio positions, the county mayor or the uh their representative, which at this time is Chris Adams, who's the director of emergency management for Hamilton County, and uh Sheriff Garrett.

Then there are six members that are appointed at large by the county mayor and confirmed by the county commission, and those can be at large from from anywhere.

When we first unified uh then Mayor Coppinger uh tried to make sure that each of the client agencies had a representative there just to facilitate the smooth transition into unified services, but uh since then uh they've been more at large rather than representative of every client agency.

Again, we unified in 2009.

Uh that was the result of three previous studies uh that were done, and the purpose of unification was not a financial savings, it was to improve the 911 service in Hamilton County.

Uh at that time in Hamilton County, overall countywide, there was a 17% abandoned rate on 911 calls.

Means roughly one in five people calling 911 were not answered.

Uh some jurisdictions had an abandoned rate up to 30 percent.

So that means one in three people calling 911 were not answered.

Uh, and that culminated locally with a house fire where the family called 9-1 could not get an answer, and eventually ran on foot down the street to a fire hall.

Uh lost the house, of course, but that made the medium put a lot of uh local pressure on improving the 9-on one service, and that's when the last study was done.

All three studies uh resoundedly recommended unification of services under the 9-1 district.

Um the result of those studies was the creation of a unification agreement between the client agencies at that time.