Should city police take over dispatching fire trucks?

A study aimed at finding ways to share services between city hall and city police is recommending consolidating police and fire dispatch services.

Prepared by management consultant KPMG, the study advises Sault Fire Services to stop answering phone calls from people reporting fires, transferring that responsibility to Sault Ste. Marie Police Service.

In a report prepared for next week's city council meeting, Tom Vair, the city's chief administrative officer, says police and city officials have determined the local central ambulance communications centre is not a suitable partner to support police dispatch.

But after any consolidation of police and fire dispatch services, KPMG is suggesting Sault police consider providing dispatch services to smaller municipalities to receive additional funding for a limited increase in workload.

This idea would also increase effectiveness of the smaller municipalities’ dispatch services, the consultant says.

Here are KPMG's eight core recommendations:

• formalize communications between the police service's and the city's finance teams
• redirect the police service finance manager's efforts to higher value activities through the downloading of some transactional tasks
• formalize service expectations and collaboration through a service level agreement and a memorandum of understanding between the city and police services 
• provide procurement support from the city to the police service by providing resources and procurement advice on high/value purchases
• formalize communications between the police service's human resources team and the city's human resources team
• redirect police service human resources manager's efforts to higher-value activities through the implementation of self-service functionalities for staff
• formalize service level agreements between the city and police service human resources teams
• transition the fire department's dispatch function to the police service

The consultant is also recommending some other "opportunities" be explored:

• consider exploring automation of the police service bidding process using the city's digital procurement software
• consider providing the police service's senior management team and board with additional finance training to ensure they have sufficient financial knowledge
• consider implementing self-service functionalities to allow staff members to independently update their personal information updates (e.g. benefits management, etc.).
• the city should consider adopting and the police service should consider further using human resources information system functionalities to streamline human resources processes

Vair says city staff agree with the KPMG recommendations regarding finance and human resources functions, and are "actively investigating a possible merger of dispatch operations.

Next week's city council meeting will be live-streamed on SooToday starting at 5 p.m. Monday.