By: Steve Benham
PORTLAND, Ore. — In a scathing report released Wednesday, the city auditor found Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications reported incorrect numbers on how fast its 911 operators answered emergency calls.
The auditor’s report said the bureau reported numbers that portrayed it as exceeding service standards, but in fact it was falling well below them.
The audit also said the bureau gave information to city commissioners “that could not have been true,” and said for years 911 operators within the bureau had known the information provided by bureau leadership to City Council was wrong and tried to “sound the alarm.”
Additionally, City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero and Ombudsman Margie Sollinger found that even though the bureau suffered from staffing shortages that negatively affected service, it continued to report that it was exceeding service standards.
“(The bureau for fiscal year 2014-15) claims that nearly 100 percent of 911 calls are answered in under 20 seconds,” the audit said. “It also claims that the average time to answer a 911 call is one second.”
Auditors found those claims were just not true.
“Contrary to the Bureau’s assertions, it is performing well below accepted standards,” the auditors wrote in their report.
BOEC’s Interim Director Lisa St. Helen, who has only been on the job for about two months and after the audit’s timeframe, said in an email Tuesday that she’s grateful for the auditor’s recommendations and acknowledged the bureau isn’t where it needs to be.
“Our performance standards were set by the BOEC User Board quite a number of years ago and with the new statistics available there is no question that we are below where we want to be,” she wrote.
She added the bureau is taking “very pro-active steps” to quickly increase staff.
She said information submitted by the previous director through a budget report did include statistics that did not align with new and corrected data available after November 2016.
“I no way wish to ‘pass the buck’ or assign blame to anyone but as a matter of fact, until 2 months ago when I was asked to maintain the Interim Director position, I was the Operations Manager and dealt primarily with the Operations of the dispatch floor,” she wrote. “I had very little, if any input into the budget or the presentation.”
The previous director was Lisa Turley. She retired from BOEC at the end of March. KATU could not immediately find contact information for Turley on Tuesday night, and, therefore, could not contact her for comment.
The Root of the Problem
The auditor’s report found the problem was rooted in a screening system called the “Reno Solution.”
That system is designed to help weed out accidental calls to 911 from cellphones by forcing callers to punch a key or say “911” to continue to a live operator.
The bureau adopted the system in 2004, and since then auditors found it could no longer accurately keep track of how long cellphone users were on hold when they called 911. Therefore, auditors said the bureau was using incomplete data to measure how fast it was answering 911 calls.
Under the current system, there are three things that happen when someone calls 911 using a cellphone: The caller must first go through the screening process to determine if the call was made accidentally. Then the caller is placed in an “emergency queue,” if no operator is immediately available. Finally, the phone rings to a live operator, known as the “ring time.”
City auditors found that the Bureau of Emergency Communications only captured data from the ring time since it adopted the Reno Solution.
Additionally, the audit found that a flaw in the system caused the bureau to lose track of tens of thousands of calls that did make it past the screening process but the caller either hung up or was disconnected. That flaw also contributed to the bureau’s inability to accurately report its performance.
“Losing track of the calls prevented the Bureau from complying with a policy to return abandoned calls to determine if an emergency existed,” the audit also said.
Despite the problems auditors said the system has, St. Helen said her bureau finds the system “invaluable.”
“We now understand that complex nature of the system and (Bureau of Technology) has developed a fix to ensure we’re obtaining accurate data,” she said.
St. Helen added that the bureau will start using a new phone system in November that’s funded by the state. The new system will eliminate the data collection issue because all data will go through a single portal no matter if a caller uses a cellphone or a landline, she said.
Auditors also pointed out the bureau has a level of independence from city government because of a 1995 intergovernmental agreement, which they argued allows the bureau to make decisions out of public view.
St. Helen said her office welcomes “any oversight at this point.”
“We recognize the fact this error in statistical reporting caused a lack of trust between our bureau and the several entities that rely on us for service,” she said.
City Commissioner Amanda Fritz oversees BOEC. Her office did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment Tuesday afternoon.