As part of legislation dealing with the fee levied on phone bills to pay for 911 emergency communications (see our 2013 Brief for details) the state included language to merge two city-based dispatch centers into their respective counties or in a regional arrangement. Our Brief noted that there were 69 answering points for emergency calls with 67 counties and the cities of Allentown and Bethlehem.
The 2015 legislation gave the two cities a four year window to fold into larger units. This was essentially done through a sunset on eligibility for funding from the fee. Bethlehem is a city that lies in both Lehigh and Northampton Counties, but it opted to merge into the latter. Allentown is going to go with Lehigh County. Allentown is in the process of completing the merger, and the Lehigh County commissioners approved a plan that describes positions and pay scales for the combined entity.
A 2012 study on the 911 fee and operations found that both cities were above average on personnel costs per staff member ($55,359) and the two cities had been grandfathered in to maintaining their separate city-based services in 1998 legislation. At the time of the 2012 study the reasons cited for keeping Allentown separate from merging was “workload and level of service”.
The hope is that encouraging the city-based centers to go larger that there will be savings, but as our work noted there is a relationship to population totals, population density, and peak time periods of high call volume.
