qathet Regional District (qRD) directors were provided an overview regarding emergency services dispatch at the July 24 committee of the whole meeting.
City of Powell River director George Doubt, who is the qRD representative to the North Island 911 board, said the committee received an interesting governance document from E-Comm about the challenges the organization is facing.
E-Comm is the organization that receives 911 calls from around the province and routes them to the appropriate organization, such as North Island 911, which covers the qathet region. The agency has just undergone a governance review, and the goal of a proposed governance change is to improve public safety by becoming a better partner and emergency communications provider through stronger governance, equitable representation for service-user partners and greater fairness and transparency in pricing.
“I read through it all [correspondence from E-Comm] and I learned a lot, and I wanted to talk about a couple of things that popped out at me,” said Doubt. “There’s a big section on board oversight and governance and how to run an organization like E-Comm. There are 23 different partner organizations and it’s a complicated board. It talks about board oversight and the importance of having people having experience and connections.”
Doubt said the report refers to finances and that affects the qRD board. He said when North Island 911 pays its bills to E-Comm for all the agency does, if the cost of E-Comm services go up, the cost of North Island 911 goes up, and it comes out of taxpayers’ pockets here, according to Doubt.
One of the funding sources E-Comm has currently is a landline levy on everyone who has a landline telephone. Doubt said he has a landline and is becoming a minority. He added that cellphone users don’t pay any contributions to E-Comm and one of the items E-Comm is looking at is having a cellphone levy, so everyone who has a cellphone and pays monthly rental for service, pays something for emergency services.
Doubt said he wanted to talk about the current process if someone makes a 911 call. He said the call goes to E-Comm, and then the agency disperses all the calls for the North Island area to North Island 911, which dispatches fire departments and other first responders.
“That’s not the way the world has to work,” said Doubt. “North Island 911 could become a primary answering system, so when you dial 911 in the North Island, you would go directly to North Island 911 and skip E-Comm. That would involve some really significant changes in the operation and different cost dynamics, but it’s a possibility.
“I wanted you to know that like a lot of organizations, the governance of the organization [E-Comm] is being looked at and it could have an effect on our taxpayers, so it’s worth looking at and thinking about.”
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