Little Rock 911-staff pay scale unfinished

City aims to keep employees, pare subpar response times

Little Rock City Manager Bruce Moore is still working on a step-and-grade pay scale for 911 Communications Center employees in an effort to retain call takers and reduce the average time it takes to answer an emergency call.

Moore had said he would have a plan ready by Monday but now says he's still working out the details. He didn't give a new date for when he will make an announcement.

"I am on travel all week, so I am working on it but [it's] not completed as of yet," Moore said.

The pay scale is one of Moore's solutions to call center vacancies, which have resulted in slow response times for answering 911 calls. There were as many as 20 vacancies in the call center earlier this year out of 67 positions. As of March, there are 13 vacant positions.

The average time it took call center employees to answer a 911 call in the most recent three-week recording period was 13 seconds.

National Emergency Number Association standards require at least 90 percent of an agency's 911 calls to be answered within 10 seconds. From the start of the year until last week, the Little Rock call center answered 67 percent of its 48,025 calls to 911 in that time.

Two percent of the 911 calls coming in, or 1,087 calls, took longer than one minute to answer, data show.

There are usually two or three employees answering calls at any given time, when optimally there should be as many as 10, Communications Center Director Laura Martin has said.

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Moore hopes higher salaries paired with shorter workweeks and other changes will help the city keep its call takers, resulting in fewer vacancies and faster answer times.

He has already approved Martin's request to move call takers from 8-hour shifts to 12-hour shifts, which will have workers off every other weekend.

Under a step-and-grade pay scale, employees are assigned a certain grade category that has a starting minimum salary associated with it. On an employee's annual hiring anniversary, he moves up one step on the scale. Most scales have a pay raise yearly for each step, though some scales change that in later years of employment by giving a pay raise every two or three years.

Uniformed police and fire employees already have a step-and-grade pay system. They also get whatever across-the-board employee raise that is adopted with the city's budget each year.

Just last month, Moore created a step-and-grade pay scale for city employees covered under the nonuniformed union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. That union represents 383 Little Rock workers, including sanitation and street crews, and zoo employees.

At the time, Moore said he would eventually have to move all of the city's more-than 2,000 employees under a step-and-grade system, but that it would be a long-term to-do item.

"Back in the 1980s, the entire organization had a step-and-grade system. That went away. ... Eventually, I am going to have to look at it because of fairness and equity," he said at the time.

Employees at the 911 call center recently became a priority after reports of poor retention rates and long wait times for those calling 911.

Moore said the step-and-grade scale he is considering for call takers will be based on data compiled by the city's Human Resources Department that compares Little Rock's salaries with nearby emergency dispatch centers, which have smaller overall call loads.

Little Rock's starting salary for a 911 call taker is $28,494 and $30,780 for a dispatcher. Call takers answer 911 calls and obtain some information before forwarding the information to a dispatcher, who is then responsible for figuring out what emergency units should respond.

The Little Rock 911 center has been understaffed for at least a decade, according to documents and data obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

At the end of 2008, the unit logged a 21 percent vacancy rate with 15 open positions in a unit authorized for 72 employees.

Vacancy rates were between 14 and 21 percent higher until 2011. The rate of call-taker vacancies then jumped to 29 percent at the end of 2012, when there were 24 vacancies in a staff authorized to number 84.

Since then, the city removed the duty of responding to 311 services request calls from the call center and made it a separate unit in an effort to let 911 call takers and dispatchers focus on emergency and nonemergency police calls.

By the end of the year, officials hope to also separate nonemergency calls into its own unit.

Answer times on nonemergency calls since January 1 have fared worse than 911 response times. With 69,953 calls coming in since the start of the year through last week, only 46 percent were answered within 10 seconds. Of 2017's incoming calls through last week, about 4 percent, or 3,106, took more than 60 seconds to be answered.

"It's my goal to get us to an adequate staffing level in 2017," Moore said. "It's just a very high-stress type of environment. We've invested in technology, equipment, but it's imperative we do the things we are doing now to ensure we get the people hired and retained. And I think the things we are doing now will definitely enhance our ability to do that."

Metro on 03/21/2017

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