LIVERMORE FALLS – Selectmen agreed Tuesday to hold a straw vote at the election polls to find out if residents want to keep emergency dispatch operations. The board plans to discuss the wording of the ballot at the next meeting.
Emotions ran high during the meeting as residents and employees voiced opposition to partially eliminating emergency dispatch operations. Others voiced concerns over rising costs and the need to cut costs where possible but fix the roads and other town infrastructure.
Selectman Joyce Drake said regardless of what people interpreted in a newspaper article Tuesday, selectmen were only planning to have a discussion on dispatch and have not already decided whether to terminate employees.
“It’s a discussion being held; it’s a fact-finding,” she said. “It’s still in the thought process.”
Selectmen have been looking for ways to save money and do needed repairs and capital improvements.
Selectman Russell Flagg brought the dispatch issue up at the last selectmen’s meeting and also noted that selectmen have the authority to eliminate the department without a vote of townspeople. One way selectmen wanted information for cost savings was seeking information on having the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department do two shifts of dispatching and Jay Police Department dispatching fire and ambulance calls.
Dispatcher Sherry Given said dispatchers were saddened that they had to read about the dispatch issue in the newspaper and not hear it from the town manager.
Former Town Manager Maxine Bailey, a resident of Livermore Falls and a member of the Dispatch Study Committee in 2003, said the committee decided it was smart to keep dispatch, and the townspeople voted to keep dispatch.
Continually bringing up the issue keeps the dispatchers wondering if they’ll have a job, Bailey said.
“I think it is very sad for them,” Bailey said. “I’ve heard more people talk about that they don’t want to lose the dispatch.”
Flagg said that the selectmen are looking for ways to regionalize services, as is the school and other towns.
“We’re paying for two services,” Flagg said.
He said it would be advantageous for the town to use the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department for dispatch services that it’s already paying for through county taxes.
Given said that emergency calls come from all over, including from State Police, Androscoggin and Franklin counties dispatchers, and straight to the Livermore Falls station.
Former selectman and Livermore Falls resident Clayton Putnam said many on the former dispatch committee went into the task of studying the feasibility of the dispatch service with closed minds.
It was stacked, he said of the committee.
Putnam said it is very important to look at regionalization and to consider Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department as the dispatch provider.
Bailey said she thinks people like it better having dispatch service in their own hometown.
“We’re not against safety in this town,” Flagg said. “We are for cost saving measures in this town.”
Drake said she doesn’t like losing local control and would like to see a question on the ballot so that residents can decide on whether they want dispatch services in town.
Flagg said he would go along with that as long as it was done at the polls and not at town meeting so that more people could give input.
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