(C) Verite News New Orleans This story was originally published by Verite News New Orleans and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . New Orleans 911 center consistently slow to answer calls, data shows [1] ['Katie Jane Fernelius', 'More Katie Jane Fernelius', 'Verite News', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width'] Date: 2024-06-04 Over at least the past year and a half, the New Orleans 911 call center has consistently failed to meet its goal of responding to emergency calls quickly, largely due to a depleted staff, which has lead to longer wait times for residents in need of prompt police, fire or ambulance service. The Orleans Parish Communication District, the agency that runs the call center — handling emergency calls, non-emergency police calls and city service requests through 311 — aims for its call-takers to answer 90% of 911 calls in 10 seconds or less. But as of April, OPCD is only meeting the 10-second goal 85% of the time, according to data reports obtained by Verite News. But OPCD’s new executive director says that the agency is making progress in addressing what he says is the biggest underlying issue at the heart of the problem: staffing. “Our call answer time is what it is because of how many people we have,” Karl Fasold, who has headed the agency since July 2023, said. “But we’re actually making headway, and we may reach full staffing by the end of the summer.” The challenges OPCD faces are far from unique to the agency. Nationwide, 911 call centers have struggled with call answer times, largely as a consequence of increased call volume paired with fewer staffers and declining revenues. New Orleans is no different. According to data obtained by Verite through a public records request, OPCD’s call volume has modestly gone up since 2020, while the agency has struggled to retain its staff, who, according to Fasold, report feeling burned out by the demands of the job. OPCD currently has 105 employees working on both 911 and 311 operations but is 40 people short of its full staffing standard of 145 employees. Most of those 40 vacancies include call-takers and dispatchers for 911. The agency’s performance improved for part of last year — though it still fell below its target — but the improvement resulted from heavy use of mandatory staff overtime ordered by its previous director, Tyrell Morris, who resigned in disgrace in July 2023. The move not only strained the agency’s budget but also drove to staff to quit, Fasold told Verite News. OPCD has struggled in the past to meet its target. In 2011, complaints of slow pickup times led then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu to add more call-takers and dispatchers to the call center, which at the time was staffed by city employees working for the New Orleans Police Department, New Orleans Fire Department and New Orleans EMS. Later, improving call-answer times was a big part of Landrieu’s push to move all 911 staffers under the control of OPCD, a state-created agency overseen by a board that includes representatives from the NOPD, the Louisiana State Police and the New Orleans Medical Society, among others. Performance improved in the late 2010s and into the early 2020s, according to media reports and OPCD board minutes, but has since slipped back below the standards. OPCD says this is due to staffing issues, increased job complexity and calls taking longer with priority dispatch after consolidation. Fasold said that he is taking steps to address the issue by increasing compensation for call-takers, changing the way the agency hires new recruits and even utilizing new AI technology to help manage call volume. “OPCD is a leader in our industry,” Fasold said. “There are bumps in the road, but thankfully the city has been very supportive.” Consistently failing to meet goal According to data obtained by Verite, the agency is consistently under-performing according to its own stated benchmark of answering 90% of calls in 10 seconds or less. In every quarter since January 2023, the percentage of calls answered in that timeframe has hovered between 82% and 88%. The 10-second standard is an older standard set by the National Emergency Number Association. But in 2020, NENA changed the standard to answering 90% of calls in 15 seconds or less and answering 95% of calls in 20 seconds or less. However, in quarterly board meetings, OPCD still measures its own success against the 10-second standard. At a March 2024 board meeting, Fasold reported that while OPCD is failing to meet the standard overall, the agency is consistently meeting it during “activation periods,” like during Mardi Gras or high-traffic festivals, when the center is fully staffed. Over the period for which the agency provided data, the call center came closest to meeting its goals in the second and third quarters of 2023 – a period in which the previous executive director, Morris, implemented mandatory overtime for employees. “Our previous executive director really wanted to meet that quota,” Fasold said. “So, from Mardi Gras until approximately September of last year, we were running mandatory overtime in order to put more butts in seats and answer calls faster. But that meant we ran out of surplus funding for unfilled positions in the budget around the same time as he left.” Fasold says that the mandatory overtime exhausted the agency’s budget and worsened staff burnout, leading many to quit. “People were leaving because of the mandatory overtime,” Fasold said. “After a while, people don’t want more money, they want to go home… And I got that. So that was why I moved to shut down the mandatory overtime.” Data obtained by Verite also shows that 20,416 calls were abandoned, or dropped, during the first quarter of 2024, which equates to about 14.72% of calls. The percentage of abandoned calls by quarter was also lower during the period of mandatory overtime in 2023: January to March 2023: 12.06% April to June 2023: 8.24% July to September 2023: 11.69% October to December 2023: 13.91% January to March 2024: 14.72% Those figures include calls dropped by either a caller, their carrier, or OPCD. But OPCD does not keep aggregate data on why calls were dropped, though the agency can investigate individual calls. “Honest mistakes are honest mistakes, and we still have people working here who are going to make mistakes,” Fasold said. “But we have systems in place to try to catch them quick. We fix them. We determine why they happened and we make sure they can’t happen again. But we don’t hide when we have a problem.” Taking over a troubled agency When Fasold assumed the role in July 2023, the agency was struggling with staffing and revenue concerns. At a September 2023 board meeting, Fasold noted that “OPCD’s financial position was grossly overstated by the previous administration.” At the July board meeting, just a few months before, Morris had said that “the agency [was] expected to meet its revenue goals” and did not raise any reasons for concern with the budget. In his own evaluation, Fasold observed that Morris had exhausted the budget through mandatory overtime. The agency was also, over the course of years, receiving fewer fees from a declining number of landlines. And many of the city’s wireless callers, like tourists and out-of-state students, pay 911 fees to the jurisdictions tied to their billing zip codes instead. Fasold assumed the role of interim executive director last July after Morris’ resignation. Though Fasold initially said that his tenure would be temporary, the board later voted in December to make the former technology director, who had played a key role in revamping the agency post-Katrina, the permanent executive director. Fasold took over an agency mired in controversy beyond the persistent staffing and revenue issues. During Morris’ tenure, there were numerous high-profile failures at OPCD. Following Hurricane Ida, the call center went down for 13 hours due to technological failures. (It has since installed technology that is less susceptible to failing due to flooding or power outages.) In a separate incident, one operator was found to be deliberately hanging up on callers before collecting important information or connecting them with emergency services. That operator was fired. Prior to his resignation, Morris faced criticism from the City Council over his operators’ documented mistakes. Morris resigned in the summer of 2023 after an investigation found that he crashed a department vehicle and failed to submit to a drug and alcohol screening, then falsified policy documents to make it appear as if he didn’t need to be screened. Morris did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday (June 4). As executive director, Fasold said plans to address the agency’s challenges head-on. He’s retooled how the agency hires call-takers so that hiring and training is more efficient. He also helped secure a 28% raise for entry-level call-takers last year, following a compensation study showing that such workers were significantly underpaid compared to the city’s own living wage standards. These changes have helped change OPCD’s culture, moving it away from a place of “cliques” and “favoritism,” Fasold said. Breonna Green, an OPCD call-taker who started in 2023, spoke positively of the raise and the paid time off she receives: “I try to at least take one day off each month, so that I don’t get burned out,” Green said in an interview. “From what I see, it is progressing,” Green said of the workplace culture. Fasold hopes that the combination of higher pay and rolling hiring will help bring the agency to its full-staffing standard, set in 2016. But Fasold said that the call center likely still needs more workers beyond that standard given that it was set eight years ago. Fasold also is introducing new technology to help manage call volume. The call center will be deploying an AI program that can isolate when a huge influx of calls comes in from the same area. Once a call-taker is on the phone and working to dispatch emergency services, the program can alert other phones calling from that area that emergency services are already on the way. “Yes, there were problems created by the previous administration and by the lack of transition and everything else, but we’re overcoming them all,” Fasold said. Related Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. [END] --- [1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/06/04/new-orleans-911-call-answer-times/ Published and (C) by Verite News New Orleans Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 US. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/veritenews/