The municipality is renewing its cooperative agreement with Parks Canada for 911 dispatch services.
The service, which is used by the municipality’s protective services—the fire brigade and, to a lesser extent, the bylaw department—and the operations department is provided by Parks. For the past six years, the municipality has had a cooperative agreement, allowing it to utilize the service for an annual fee.
The latest agreement is retroactive to April 1 and continues through to March 31, 2017, with the municipality paying $40,000 per year. That figure will increase annually by the Canadian Consumer Price Index (CPI), beginning next December.
The agreement will last until Parks launches a new software program that will track the services’ usage, providing the municipality with detailed records of the number of calls, as well as the length of calls and which departments the calls are related to.
Currently, the municipality doesn’t know how much of the service’s overall usage it’s responsible for, and in turn, whether it is paying the correct amount.
Fire Chief Greg Van Tighem told council Dec. 9, during its committee-of-the-whole meeting, that once the new software is in place, it will give the municipality “a proper comparison” of its usage and that of Parks, “so we can see if we are in fact being invoiced a fair amount.
“That’s something we want to know,” he said.
The municipality is also hoping to acquire data on the level of usage from each of its departments, so that the fee can be divvied out accordingly.
“In the past the dispatch fee was picked up totally by the protective services department,” explained Alice Lettner, director of finance. “However, we have recognized that now that bylaw has gone to a different system for maintaining contact with the different agencies, they’re using this service less, and more and more of the dispatch service is now being supported by operations.”
So, for the first time, in the 2015 budget—which council will vote on in the new year—the fee has been split between operations and protective services, to create a fair cost distribution.
Nicole Veerman
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