For the past year, the Spokane City Council has been a unified voice standing in opposition to concerns about the desire to combine the region's different dispatch agencies — 911, Spokane Police, Spokane County Sheriff and the fire departments — under one governing body: Spokane Regional Emergency Communications (SREC).
Even as the rest of the county has planned to switch to the new integrated system, concerns from the City Council have remained constant: The council couldn't get clear answers on a number of crucial questions. Even as a deadline looms this week for the City Council to make its decision, nobody has a clear answer to the most fundamental life-or-death question: How fast is Spokane's current dispatching system compared to the numerous already-integrated dispatch centers across the country?
That's because nobody has the answer to an even more basic question: On average, how long does it take from the moment you finishing 911 to the moment the Fire Department is alerted to your emergency?
"I don’t know," says Steve Reinke, SREC director. "Just honestly, we don’t know."