The historic courthouse and annex are crammed and slammed. The county's emergency nerve center is far from centralized, and it's ergonomically challenged enough to fray the nerves.
To walk through the sheriff's office shoehorned into the third floor of the annex is a genuine 1970s experience.
Workers emerge from shifts in the high-stress 9-1-1 dispatch center in the bowels of the courthouse like coal miners surfacing into the sunshine.
“That's kind of what's driving this whole process,” Commissioner Larry Anderson said.
County voters on Nov. 4 will be asked to say yea or nay to funding most of the construction of an emergency operations and regional training center next to the county's 9-year-old regional detention facility on Mullan Road.
Cost of the project is an estimated $23.5 million, $16 million of which voters will decide whether to pay over the next 20 years.
Maybe such a request could come at a worse time. Probably not.
The bond issue is the culmination of a dozen years of planning and saving for a new facility, Anderson said. At first, the thought was it could be paid for in total from county coffers and grant money, but the rising construction costs made that impossible.
Even though the original “dream” was cut back nearly in half, taxpayers will be asked to pay nearly two-thirds of the bill.
“We can't afford to hold off any more,” Anderson said.
The current clouds of financial chaos gathered months after Anderson and fellow commissioners Jean Curtiss and Bill Carey decided to take it to voters.
“It's a changing dynamic and it's very unfortunate,” Anderson said. “But as a county official I would be irresponsible if I didn't try to take all the work we've done in recognizing the problem, realizing it's the county's responsibility to provide secure, adequate facilities for these folks and try everything we could to keep the cost down as much as possible if we didn't ask the voters to approve it.
“It's one of those things that we have to do it now or the cost is just going to increase that much more.”
“They're not guilty of doing anything other than just having unfortunately very bad timing,” said Harold Blattie, executive director of the Montana Association of Counties. “I would hope that voters would look at the need that is there, but I think it's naive to think the voters aren't going to consider their particular situation.”
While promoters of the bond stress the need for more space, they are compelled to assure the public the job still gets done in the county's current digs.
“Missoula County already has some of the finest emergency services in the state,” reads a county-funded flier distributed in newspapers and at gatherings around the county. “This will help ensure the level of service we are accustomed to continues.”
Voters are asked to help improve conditions in areas they rarely see.
“People tend to not have a lot of interaction with the county,” pointed out Blattie, a former Stillwater County commissioner. “They'll go to the treasurer to pay property taxes or get license plates. When it comes to the jail and public safety things, they're generally not favorable interactions.”
It's truly a see-it-to-believe-it issue, Bob Reid said.
The county's director of emergency services and a few other officials have been doubling as tour guides.
Twice a week - at noon on Tuesdays and 5:30 p.m. on Thursdays - they meet anyone who wants to show up at the courthouse information desk. Reid takes visitors downstairs to what passes for the current emergency operations center, a room 22 feet long and less than 15 feet wide. It seats perhaps 20 people.
In the schematics for the new EOC on Mullan Road, there'll be room for 200, Reid said. It can be divided into four classrooms. When not employed as an operational center during disasters, it will be used for training by a number of local emergency agencies, including city police and rural and city fire.
The next stop is the 9-1-1 dispatch center down the hall, which has six dispatch positions in a windowless room with an eerie atmosphere. The center took 160,000 phone calls in 2007, or 438 each day. The numbers rise 10 percent every year.
“We're just at the limit of our capacity right now to handle all that,” Reid said.
When the center was first moved to the basement corner, it dispatched calls to four agencies.
“That's grown over the years to 28 agencies, so the demand has increased dramatically,” said Anderson.
Sheriff Mike McMeekin and undersheriff Jerry Crego share the tour-guide duties for their department, which is scattered all over the place. Fully half of the county's law enforcement force works at the jail facilities on Mullan Road. There's little personal interaction between them and the 50 deputies and sergeants based downtown, Crego said.
Crego's office sits at the east end of the central office on the third floor of the courthouse annex. McMeekin's is two stories down, on the courthouse's west side.
“We don't even have room for the boss up here,” Crego said.
Privacy is all but nonexistent upstairs, where four detectives share a single room in which to interview witnesses and victims. A tiny room around the corner is stocked with file cabinets that block the outside window and a small round table used to interrogate suspects.
“It's just inadequate for what they're trying to do,” said Larry Farnes, the county's facilities director. “They don't have room there to interview people, or to deal with handling evidence. The kitchen-slash-evidence-slash-interview room doesn't serve anybody correctly.”
Bill Flanery, a retired minister from Missoula, didn't know what to expect when he took the courthouse tour Tuesday. He said he got an eyeful.
“They obviously are reaching the limit of their present facility, and probably in some cases exceeding it,” Flanery said. “In the two years it'll take to get a new facility built, they'll certainly outgrow what they've got now.”
Bonds issued for the EOC would result in an estimated increase of $27.82 for a home assessed at $200,000. That's based on an interest rate of 4.85 percent.
“I'm actually hoping to do better than that,” said chief administrative officer Dale Bickell, who added that taxpayers aren't likely to see the increase until November 2010.
If the bond fails, construction inflation of the five-year average of 10 percent will drive the cost of a new EOC up another $3.4 million in two years, the next time Bickell figures the county would go back to the voters.
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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Vrede wrote on Oct 9, 2008 11:46 AM:
" Where's the counter-argument to voting for these bonds in this article? Or, is it an ad paid for by Missoula County? "
Jack wrote on Oct 9, 2008 2:01 PM:
" I just mailed off my absentee ballot today -- having had a chance to read this story first. I voted "yes" for the bond initiative. Having been the recipient twice in the past few years of assistance from emergency services, I can find no way to justify NOT supporting this. When city fire fighters/paramedics were at my house on Thanksgiving Day in under seven minutes to assist a family member having heart problems, I couldn't thank them enough. When city police officers were at my house at 4 a.m. when a drunk stranger thought my house was his, I couldn't thank them enough. I want to make sure everyone in Missoula County gets that kind of service for years to come when the dial 9-1-1. This will ensure that happens VOTE YES!! "
Jim wrote on Oct 9, 2008 5:41 PM:
" The City and County need to get back together and make one EOC. Taxpayers cant afford to pay for 2 of these projects "
Erik wrote on Oct 9, 2008 9:57 PM:
" Vote no. If it isn't broke don't fix it. If I call 911 right now I will get taken care of. I wonder if we let our government go unchecked if it would devour us entirely. In the future I would ax politicians like our Mayor Engen that couldn't even think of finding a way to bail out the city other than raise our taxes 5%. Max baucus is the runner up with voting to bailout wallstreet. Have you had enough yet. Is the pain not enough. Start voting and encouraging restraint before it is to late. Erik "
Ray Nelson wrote on Oct 9, 2008 9:50 AM:
I suggest that county officials go back and work with their counterparts to request a new city / county / state / federal / homeland security law-enforcement mega-plex. Surely Montana's Senators and Congressman could request some earmark funding to take away most of the financial pain. The cost of this project is chump change in the larger scheme of things and could could be easily be added to the Ford/GM bailout. "