MCP Helps the Imperial Valley Pursue PSAP Regionalization

In Summary:

• Imperial County, CA is served by four public safety answering points (PSAPs) that provide call-taking and dispatching services for the Imperial Valley.
• In 2017, they hired Mission Critical Partners to help them determine if physical regionalization made sense.
• MCP provided a comprehensive feasibility study that made a recommendation to transition its four PSAPs into two mutually supporting PSAPs.

"With MCP's help, we've identified the issues and challenges that stand between us and a successful regionalization effort. Now that we know it could work for us, we need to determine how to make it a reality and execute on that plan."

Mark Schmidt, Emergency Communications Project Coordinator, Imperial County Communication Authority, Imperial County, California

Overview and Agency Challenge

Imperial Valley, California, is served by four public safety answering points (PSAPs) that provide call-taking and dispatching services for the Imperial Valley. The Imperial Valley Communications Authority (IVECA), in conjunction with the San Diego County Regional Communications System , provides public safety voice and data communications to more than 200 local, state and federal agencies in San Diego and Imperial counties.

The County’s PSAPs were already sharing technology resources, but wanted to figure out if sharing services also made sense in terms of staffing and maintenance costs.

How Mission Critical Partners Helped

MCP teamed with IVECA to conduct a feasibility study that laid the groundwork for MCP’s recommendations and an initial plan for moving forward with regionalizing the County’s PSAPs, and produced a report for IVECA that outlined:

• current condition benchmarks
• an assessment of existing technology
• projected call volumes and workloads in a regionalized PSAP
• projected staffing levels needed to meet call volumes and workloads
• potential PSAP consolidation models, as well as new organizational and governance structures

The Results

MCP delivered the report to the IVECA executive board in April 2017 that identified the issues and challenges that stand between the IVECA and a successful regionalization effort, helping demonstrate to the organization a methodical approach for moving forward with PSAP regionalization in order to accomplish operational and staffing efficiencies, and ultimately, reduce costs.