Baltimore County's 911 Center is typically a stressful environment as the call-takers and dispatchers work to send emergency personnel to all corners of the county. But of late, that environment has taken on a greater stress with 20 unfilled jobs, roughly a 10 percent vacancy rate.
To fix the matter temporarily, county officials have taken seven police and paramedics off the front lines and assigned them to the 911 center. The seven will remain at the 911 center until new employees are trained. The reposted employees were not given a choice about the transfers.
It could be the right solution, given the situation the county has found itself. But we're puzzled how the problem came about in the first place.
The call center has 190 positions for call-takers and dispatchers. It also has a higher-than-average use of sick leave, perhaps due to the high level of stress inherent in the job, and county officials say it is hard to keep the center staffed, even with mandatory overtime. But shouldn't the county have had a better handle on the staffing situation long before they had to take the extreme step of taking personnel off of the street?
Union leaders seem to agree.
"Taking a cop off the street on a shift that is short-staffed in the first place to work in the 911 center ... doesn't help," David Rose of the Baltimore County Fraternal Order of Police told the Baltimore Sun. "Both are equally important."
County officials point out that the police and fire departments have more than 1,000 uniformed employees each — more than enough to absorb a temporary loss of a handful. And that's likely the case. But we don't like the message that this decision sends, not just to the men and women who work these high-stress jobs but also to county residents who expect that replacing these openings would be a top priority.
We hope these 911 transfers are a temporary stopgap measure and were not born of some attempt at cost savings. That's why we urge the County Council to assure citizens that these transfers are an anomoly and nothing more. The council should quiz the Kamenetz administration and assure us that it won't happen again. .