Mesa Council updated on city’s new Public Safety Support Department

By Connor Van Ligten
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The Mesa City Council was recently given an update on the city’s new Public Safety Support Department.

According to a presentation given by Mesa Assistant City Manager Scott Butler and Mesa PD Deputy Director Kim Meza, the overall goal of the new department is to enhance safety, efficiency and collaboration in the city’s public safety systems. Such systems include 911 dispatchers, emergency alerts and more for the fire department, police department and more.

“Right now, we have a lot of duplication that occurs when you’re having the same process that happens in both the police department and the fire department,” Butler said at an April 10 study session. “So one of the efforts of this department is to get the efficiencies up by combining a lot of those activities into one organization from an administrative side.”

Butler said that he hopes the consolidation will increase efficiency in the long run. But the relationship between the dispatcher and the public servant will still remain intact.

“We definitely believe we will see those long-term efficiencies by consolidating that into one area,” Butler said. “But in addition to that, we listened closely to our fire and police management. We talked to our friends in labor and we understood the important relationship that exists between our dispatchers and the firefighters and police officers that they work with...we have heard loud and clear from our folks in public safety that keeping that direct relationship between our dispatchers and their respective departments was very important. You’ll see from the new model that we have adopted the dispatchers to remain within police and fire and under that chain of command.”

Butler and Meza showed a graphic detailing how the department will be split into four divisions: call-taking division; performance, quality and community engagement division; core services division; and forensic services decisions.

Meza explained the call-taking division and forensic divisions.

“New call taking and a focus on call taking in its aspect of delivering a one caller experience where when somebody calls regardless the resources they need, be it police or fire or medical, they will talk to one person and then that information will then be sent to the dispatch of both police and fire,” Meza said. “The forensic science division has been essentially the same as it’s been operating now for about 10 years.”

Meza also explained how the performance devision and core services divisions will work.

“So clinical services, our quality assurance training, hiring, can all be combined and be more efficient being done together,” Meza said. “So that would be our performance quality community engagement. Our core services are all of the personnel aspects of the purchasing and the fiscal side. The employee services are HRM (human resource management) or our employee funding and tracking.”

The next Mesa City Council meeting takes place at 5:45 p.m. April 21 at 20 E. Main St.