Recording in progress.

Good afternoon.

I would like to call this meeting of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety to order.

I'm Councilmember Brooke Pinto representing Ward 2 and chairwoman of the committee.

Today is Monday, November 2nd, and the time is 1 15 p.m.

We are conducting this hearing in person in room 120 and virtually via Zoom and streaming on the DC Council's website and YouTube and ex at CM Brook Pinto.

We have a quorum today with at large council member Anita Bonds and Ward 6 Council Member Charles Allen.

Today we have six items on the agenda.

I will speak about each of them in turn.

First, Bill 26-599, the Emergency Medical Services Classification Amendment Act of 2026.

I introduced this bill along with Council Members Janice Lewis George and Anita Bonds on February 19, 2026, and for which the committee held a hearing on March 18th, 2026.

This bill aims to improve and protect accuracy in emergency and non-emergency call responses at the Office of Unified Communications, or OUC, home to the DC 911 call center.

The

DC 911 call center is responsible for providing fast professional and cost effective response to emergency and non-emergency calls in the district.

OUC was established in 2005 to combine the emergency 911, non-emergency, and 311 call activities from the Metropolitan Police Department, Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department, and Customer Service Operations.

Residents and visitors to the district deserve a 911 call center that is efficient, speedy, and accurate.

In past years, the committee and the council received a significant number of complaints from DC residents about long call to answer waiting times, errors, and transparency issues at the agency.

Operational problems and mistakes of the agency over wrong addresses led to injuries and even tragic deaths.

Since that time, I've worked closely with OUC through oversight and legislation to institute and sustain needed improvements, including the public dashboard for reporting 911 call errors to increase transparency and accountability established by my Secure DC Omnibus Amendment Act of 2024.

There have been important payoffs and progress of these efforts in terms of efficiency and speed.

For example, in 2023, only 74% of calls the agency received were answered within 20 seconds or less.

Following rigorous oversight by this committee and work with the agency from 2025 to 2026 of the 1.4 million calls OUC received, the agency has now surpassed the national 911 call answering standard of 95% of calls answered within 20 seconds or less.

They are now answering 98% of all 911 calls within four seconds.

While we have been thrilled

to see these critical improvements in efficiency and speed, further legislation is necessary to improve and protect accuracy in call responses.

OUC operates one of the busiest emergency call centers in the nation, and the work performed by call takers and dispatchers is extraordinarily difficult and high stakes.

For example, in fiscal year 2025 alone, OUC received 2.3 million calls requiring responses from first responders across the district.

The work of this agency and thus high stakes in the public interest, any mistake or delay can have life-altering consequences.

The point is not just to fill seats but also to provide strong and lasting training to ensure that accuracy is met given the extreme high volume of calls.

So this bill has introduced as two primary things.

It first clarifies the fire and EMS Medical Director statute to explicitly codify that the FIRE and EMS Medical Director is also the medical director of OUC to provide oversight, supervision, and final decision making for all clinical aspects of pre-hospital emergency and medical services.

In clarifying the duties of the doctor of the director, excuse me, the bill also confers upon the medical director explicit authority over selecting, revising, and establishing dispatch protocols and response plans regarding emergency and medical services, as well as explicit authority over quality assurance of EMS dispatch and emergency medical services, including continuous quality improvement programs.

And it codifies the training requirement that within one year of being hired or for current employees within one year of this bill going into effect, call takers and dispatchers be certified in a medical emergency dispatch or EMD, which is training for handling calls for emergency medical services.

Although currently OUC requires call takers and dispatchers to be EMD certified, this requirement is not codified.

This change is necessary to ensure OUC is national best practice training, regardless of who we have in the agency leadership.

Our print retains the introduced language for most

for

the most part, but adds two additional things.

First, that the medical director will publish and transmit to the committee with jurisdiction over OUC annually a summary of quality assurance findings, categories of error, and programmatic corrective actions without identifying any patient, caller, or employee.

This will complement the OUC dashboard for ensuring public transparency and council oversight.

Second, since OUC call takers are universal call takers, meaning they take all kinds of calls, our print also required certifications for emergency fire dispatch or EFD to be approved by the fire chief and emergency police dispatch EPD to be approved by the police chief.

The agency is fortunately currently doing rigorous credentialing, but this practice is not codified in law, so the bill will ensure that future administrations at OUC adhere to best practices regardless of leadership.

This bill will ensure that the progress made and the public trust in this agency are enhanced and protected by making certain that accuracy and transparency in call response match the current gains in efficiency and speed that the 911 call center has achieved.

I'm very thankful to the agency, to many advocates and experts who testified and worked very closely with me and my team in the development of this bill.

With that, I now move the print and report of Bill 26-599 with lead for staff to make technical, editorial and conforming changes.

Is there any discussion?

Go

ahead, Councilmember

Bonds.

All right.

Thank you very much.

And thanks again for this piece of legislation, and I was very pleased to sign on to it.

I think it goes a long way to look at the training that particular important staff have as they are trying to be responsive as well as to dispatch the calls.

I am hoping that in the future, and expect this committee to go further and making improvements on what I've heard recently, and that is the coordination of service delivery by the staff managers and FIMS and MPD in their response to the calls.

So I'm excited about, I think this is a leapfrog forward for us in the District of Columbia, and I look forward to it being implemented so that Dave Slattery will not have to send information to me on a regular basis as he does throughout the community because when all is said and done, we're about saving lives, about helping people, and that's what this call center really aims to do, and it's been doing a very good job at that.

And it will improve, I'm sure.

So thank

you.

Thank

you very much, Councilmember Bonds, and thank you for co-introducing this bill as well.