Officials are considering hiring more employees at the Grand Forks 911 center to handle an increase in the number of emergency calls.
Director Becky Ault presented the Grand Forks Public Safety Answering Point annual report at a Grand Forks County Commission meeting earlier this week. She said the number of calls coming into the center should continue to increase and with some employee turnover, it's hard to handle.
"We're carefully looking at this," Ault said. 'We don't want to add more people if we don't need to, however, we're really feeling the crunch."
Ault said she's considering hiring two employees in 2016 and currently has four in training.
The center receives both emergency and nonemergency calls. In 2014, employees received 22,947 calls, an increase of less than 1 percent from the year prior.
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"The first quarter of 2015 indicates higher calls service volume than within the last two years," Ault said.
The majority of the calls in 2014 came in from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 83 percent came from wireless devices.
More than 73,000 calls for service were created by the calls, the majority of which were answered by the Grand Forks Police Department.
While PSAP is operating within its budget, Ault suggested increasing the county's 911 fee from $1 per wireline and wireless device to $1.50 in 2016 as the revenue from that decreased by about $27,000 in 2014. She said it would potentially generate between $350,000 and $380,000 that could be used on capital improvement projects, though the commission took no action.
PSAP works with the North Dakota 911 Association through a joint powers agreement to continually update equipment and work is underway to implement a text to 911 service statewide.
Ault stressed the importance of being able to handle all of the calls. She said training new employees to handle everything independently takes about six months and that it can be up to three years before an operator is comfortable.
"I don't see this going down," Ault said in reference to the number of calls. "It's continuing to go up."
