Bureaucracy Puts 911 Upgrade on Hold

It was a powerful message: a television ad showing a hand with a gun approaching a door as a woman inside frantically dialed 911, only to get a busy signal.

The ad was part of a successful campaign in 1992 that helped persuade Los Angeles voters to approve a $235-million bond issue to revamp the city’s outdated and overburdened emergency communications system.

While some vital improvements have been made, the centerpieces of the measure--two state-of-the-art dispatch centers--have not yet broken ground. The city finally picked a downtown site for one center last year, but is still studying an alternative site for the San Fernando Valley facility, and has yet to choose a contractor to build either.

The system, approved in 1992, is now due for completion in 2002--giving the project more than twice the time it took to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

“We’ve been very concerned,” Deputy City Controller Tim Lynch said. “It’s inexcusable. The crisis is real.”

For the first nine months of this year, 92,342 calls to 911 went unanswered, about 6.4% of the total received, according to Los Angeles Police Department figures. During the same period, 75,640 callers waited 20 seconds or more before their call was answered.

The worst year on record was 1995, when nearly one in three 911 calls to the overloaded system went unanswered for at least 10 seconds, and more than 325,000 calls were abandoned by callers.

The improvement has been steady in recent years, but thousands of calls are still being abandoned.

Although the dispatch centers remain designs on paper, improvements have been made on other components of the emergency system--a complex web of computers, radios and telephones that link dispatchers and police officers in the field. Using the bond money, the LAPD has distributed more than 7,500 new hand-held radios to officers and installed a $2.5-million backup phone system for 911 calls.

As of Sept. 30, the city had spent less than half of the $235 million in bond proceeds.

“While ground hasn’t been broken yet [on the centers], the bond measure was much more comprehensive,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, chairwoman of the council’s Public Safety Committee. “There has been a lot of progress made.”

Several people involved with the project said the plodding pace actually saved money and allowed the city to take advantage of better technology.

“Basically, when you develop these huge systems, technology is probably one of the only areas where, if you delay, it works to your advantage, because technology is moving so fast that prices are going down,” said Assistant City Administrative Officer Terry Munoz, who chairs the steering committee that oversees the project.

The 911 upgrade, meanwhile, has been hampered by frequent second-guessing of sites already picked for the new dispatch centers. At least four locations have been considered for each center, and last year police and fire experts persuaded the City Council to reverse a decision made years earlier to build the downtown 911 center at the LAPD’s Westchester training facility.

That change alone was estimated to cost about $3 million. The downtown facility is now planned for Los Angeles and 1st streets, near City Hall.

Chick said a recent dispute between the city and a contractor, Motorola, over the design of a mobile data terminal system for police cars convinced her that more oversight was needed. The disagreement was finally resolved, but caused a delay of more than a year for that piece of the project.

In March, the council adopted a Public Safety Committee report requiring quarterly updates from the panel of city officials now guiding the project. The most recent status report said the current 911 projects are “on schedule and within the overall budgeted funds.” It indicates the entire project should be finished by June 2002.

City Controller Rick Tuttle began monitoring the 911 project early in the process, advising the mayor in a 1994 letter of “the multitude of delays and excuses” hampering several bond-funded programs.

In 1995, Tuttle urged police to tighten management controls on the 911 project. Police officials blamed most of the lag on “cumbersome and exhaustive” review processes and inadequate staffing.

Requests to issue contracts and hire staff members for the project often lingered for months before being approved, said Linda Bunker, the LAPD’s project manager for the 911 upgrade. The requests, she said, sifted slowly through bureaucratic layers from the police chief and commission to the mayor, city administrative officer and the City Council and its committees.

“It can take months, literally months,” Bunker said. “Everybody wants to have their hands on this. . . . The city is ill-equipped to manage this kind of projects in a timely manner.”

The 911 upgrade got off to a slow start, in part because the city was unprepared for the bond’s passage and did not have adequate start-up money or staffing in place to begin work immediately. Two previous ballot measures to finance 911 improvements--in 1990 and 1991--had failed.

But in the spring of 1992, riots sparked by acquittal verdicts for four LAPD officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King swept through the city. The upheaval helped convince voters that the time had come to upgrade police equipment and fund the construction of two dispatch centers, one for the Valley and one for downtown.

In the years since the bond measure passed, police leaders have said the project was always envisioned as a 10-year effort. But the bond measure presented to voters six years ago made no mention of a timeline.

The hallmark of the bond issue remains the two dispatch centers. They would replace the cramped quarters of the current 911 center, a former bomb shelter buried four floors beneath City Hall East, which flooded in October, causing technicians to shut down the communications system and revert to a backup telephone network.

At an estimated cost of $18 million each, the centers would be built to withstand an earthquake of 8.3 magnitude, according to police plans. To ease the stress inherent in 911 operators’ jobs, plans for the buildings include better air flow, vaulted ceilings and roomier consoles.

In the meantime, the site for the Valley 911 hub--approved two years ago for West Hills, where the city spent $1 million buying the planned site at Roscoe Boulevard and Fallbrook Avenue--is still being debated. Former Councilman Richard Alarcon, now a state senator, had urged the city to consider saving money by putting the 911 center in the Anthony Building in Sun Valley.

“The thing that has pulled us off center is looking at the Valley site,” Bunker said. “We have to write reports, go out and visit, attend meetings. That’s all cost us hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of people time.”

The city’s chief legislative analyst and other staff members are now studying the Anthony Building as a potential site for the Valley center, a suggestion opposed by the Police Department, Chick and Councilman Hal Bernson, whose district includes the planned West Hills site.

“We’re throwing out ideas for all kinds of functions to be located in the Anthony Building and this just happened to be one of them,” said Gerry Miller, the assistant chief legislative analyst.

“We’re all mindful of the fact that we need to proceed as expeditiously as possible.”