Mayor George Flaggs Jr. wants to take a close look at number of calls Vicksburg Warren County 911 handles per month to see if the county dispatch center is really handling the volume of calls E-911 director Chuck Tate says they handle.

According Vicksburg Warren County E-911 records, dispatchers handle between 20,000 and 25,000 incoming and outgoing calls per month.

Flaggs wants to break those numbers down to determine how accurate that count is.

“I want to quantify them,” he said. “If these numbers are true, they are actually getting about 35 calls an hour if you divide it out, and that’s a high volume of calls for a county of about 40,000 people with a city and county with a sheriff’s department, police department and ambulance and rescue that’s a lot of calls.

“I’m going over there to work and see how many stations there are and how they utilize the personnel they’ve got now.”

His comments follow a visit he, Tate and city IT director Billy Gordon made to the Lee County E-911 Center in Tupelo. According to Lee County E-911 records, Lee County system receives between 14,000 and 15,000 calls per month while placing about 5,000 outgoing calls per month.

Tate and the Vicksburg Warren County E-911 Board in July recommended the Board of Mayor and Aldermen and the Warren County Board of Supervisors increase the number of 911 dispatchers from 17 to 21 full-time dispatchers. The city and county split the cost of dispatcher salaries and benefits.

Between leave, vacation and illness, Tate said in July, he typically has about four people on shift 80 percent of the time.

“Only about 20 percent of the time, do I have a full shift. Under this situation, we would still have people working 11 hours instead of 12, and we don’t have to bring anybody in on overtime,” he said.

Flaggs opposes adding the dispatchers and scheduled the Tupelo trip to learn how the Lee County E-911 system works as a way to determine how to operate Warren County’s center with its available dispatchers.

Flaggs called the trip productive. “I’m glad we went,” he said. “I thought Tupelo had a first-class operation. They serve 100,000 people in the day and about 80,000 at night. They have five (dispatch) stations to maintain, but they also have two trainers and a quality assurance person to make certain the program is going good.

“Anytime we can get first-hand information to make a comparative analysis, it’s always good for the taxpayer,” he said.

“I learned some great stuff,” Tate said. “Put it simply, their telephone call volume is about 75 percent of ours. They handle more agencies than we do, because they have more small communities than we do and they have more volunteer fire departments in their county, so they have more agencies on their radio system.

“Their budget is larger than ours. They just went to where they’re going to have five dispatchers on a shift.”

He said he asked Lee County dispatchers what they wanted most, “and the number one thing they said is the same thing we get here, they want their day off, which is the same problem everywhere. We’re understaffed and we need more people to be able to do that.”

Flaggs said his goal for looking at the county’s E-911 operation is to provide the best service to the taxpayers “and make certain we protect the employees, because they’re concerned about fatigue. I want to take a close look at the entire operation before we give in to giving them more personnel.”

The mayor has said several times he is looking at streamlining costs of operation because the city is a business.

“But the city is not a business that’s trying to make money,” Tate said. “The city is like a financial investor. It takes tax income from the people and invests it in services for the services for common good.”

The benefits, from the city services, he said, do not go back to the city, but to the taxpayers who invested the money in the form of lower insurance, lower crime rates and better emergency medical service.

“If you spend some money, but you don’t spend enough, that benefit doesn’t come back to the people,” he said. “You’ve got to spend enough money to realize that benefit. You need to look at it as not that the city has to save money. The city has to invest money wisely so the people get the right return.

“The last thing you want to have when you call 911 is to hear ‘all of our operators are busy. Stay on the line, we’ll get to you when we can.’

“When you have an emergency, that’s the last thing you want to hear, but that’s what you’re going to hear if you don’t have enough people.”