CENTERFIELD—A March 18 special meeting between both Gunnison and Centerfield leadership about the future of Sanpete County dispatch moved beyond a routine budget discussion and into a broader debate over whether the county should create a dedicated tax line item or other countywide funding method to keep emergency dispatch local while covering rising state-driven costs.

The meeting happened in the Centerfield City Council chambers and focused on two related issues: the growing cost of running dispatch and the question of who should pay for it. Officials discussed an annual communications budget that has grown from about $400,000 in earlier years to roughly $700,000 now and is projected to reach about $850,000 in the next budget cycle.

Those increases were tied to new responsibilities that go beyond traditional 911 call-taking, including text-to-911, video-capable 911 service, school emergency button monitoring, school camera monitoring, and state expectations for two dispatchers on duty rather than one.

Dispatch supervisor Neal Johnson said those changes have reshaped the local dispatch center’s workload.

“We’ve gone from just taking phone calls, we take 911 video calls now, we take 911 texts,” Johnson said.

Johnson said another major driver is the need to replace the county’s current computer-aided dispatch system, or CAD. He said state law requires dispatch centers to have CAD-to-CAD interoperability with every other 911 center in Utah by July 2029. The current system does not meet that standard, he said, and a replacement is expected to cost about $175,000 a year under a long-term contract, in addition to a server estimated at about $100,000 and data migration costs estimated at $40,000 to $60,000. Johnson said the county could use 911 funds for the server, cover migration costs and absorb the CAD cost for the first two years before phasing the rest in over five years.

The county’s initial proposal would bill cities and service providers directly, using population figures for cities and call volume for certain agencies. Under the figures presented, Gunnison’s annual share would be about $49,000 and Centerfield’s about $33,000. Snow College would move to a call-based amount of about $22,000, while four ambulance agencies combined would be charged about $99,000.

The county’s unincorporated share was discussed at about $153,000, though officials said they had not yet settled on the exact collection method for that portion.

Johnson said the county’s argument was that dispatch is a public safety service provided to specific entities and should be billed that way.
“We’re the only dispatch center that is not billing for our services, to your entities we dispatch for,” Johnson said.

Most of the meeting centered on a competing idea pushed by Gunnison Mayor Michael Wanner, who argued that dispatch should be treated more like a countywide public safety utility and funded through a tax line item or similar countywide charge rather than by sending separate bills back to cities and service providers.

Wanner said city residents already help pay for local police, fire and ambulance service and would be hit again if dispatch costs were pushed back through city budgets.

“It hits us, triple whammy,” Wanner said.

He argued that spreading the cost across all county taxpayers would lower the burden on individual communities and would better reflect the fact that dispatch serves both incorporated towns and unincorporated areas.

“The burden in total is a lot less if you really go back and consider a county tax instead,” Wanner said.

That discussion led to repeated references to truth in taxation, the Utah process required when a taxing entity seeks more property tax revenue than it would receive from the same rate applied to new valuations. At the meeting, officials discussed whether the county could make smaller, more regular tax adjustments over time rather than waiting for a large jump later. Johnson said he favored that general approach.

“It’s a lot better just to gradually do it each year for the homeowner and the citizen,” Johnson said.

Gunnison Valley Police Chief Jason Adamson also questioned the proposed city billing model. He said Gunnison’s current CAD-related cost is much lower than what could come under the new structure and questioned whether population is a fair way to divide the bill.

Adamson and others also said a population- or household-based billing model would be difficult to administer fairly because family size changes over time and local governments do not have a straightforward way to track that accurately.

Brenda Bartholomew of Gunnison Valley Hospital said direct billing would also strain ambulance operations.

“The hospital’s ambulance subdivision does not make money,” Bartholomew said. “So, we break even, and then adding $23,000, $22,000 to this? I feel like the people who are responding are the ones that are paying a big loan instead of the people.”

Johnson said that all parties must consider the risk of failing to meet state requirements. He warned that if Sanpete County does not comply with staffing and interoperability standards, the dispatch center could face shutdown or forced consolidation with an outside center, which he said could cost local agencies significantly more.

By the end of the March 18 meeting, officials appeared to agree on the larger goal of keeping dispatch local and getting the system into compliance before the 2029 deadline. City officials pressed for the countywide tax or fee concept to be taken to the full county commission for further discussion.

At Gunnison’s April 1 council meeting, that broader debate resurfaced when city officials considered the last of three county emergency service agreements. Council members approved the remaining standard operating guidelines agreement after hearing the county wanted all three agreements in place for Gunnison to receive about $10,703 in reimbursement, but city officials also said the agreement should not be read as settling the larger dispute over how dispatch should be funded.

During that same discussion, Gunnison officials said they had located a 1991 interlocal agreement with the county that runs through 2040 and refers to 911 service funding tied to telephone lines. Wanner said he believes that earlier agreement was intended to cover the county’s 911 surcharge, not the broader dispatch-cost model now under discussion and said any expanded arrangement should come back through a new or updated interlocal agreement.