With two months to go until the East Hampton Town Police Department takes over the lion’s share of emergency dispatching responsibilities from East Hampton Village, questions linger about the cost of the transition and how the town department will handle the new workload.
The baton will be passed on Jan. 1, when the town will take on all non-village police calls.
A month later, it will begin dispatching fire and emergency medical service calls for the Springs Fire District and the Village of Sag Harbor. (East Hampton Village will continue dispatching for the Montauk and Amagansett Fire Districts until Dec. 31, 2027.)
Since the inception of the service, the village had handled all those calls, serving as the primary public safety answering point, or P.S.A.P., for the town, transferring only police calls outside of the village back to the town dispatchers.
Now, the primary public safety answering point will be the “radio room” at the town police headquarters in Wainscott.
“People will not notice the change,” East Hampton Town Police Chief
Michael Sarlo promised in a mid-October interview about the upcoming shift. When dispatch negotiations between the two municipalities broke down last spring, the town issued a press release arguing that taking 911 calls in-house would save taxpayers $2.5 million over the next decade.
However, those savings didn’t include a $1.5 million bond issued this summer or the $834,478 of software costs (for only the next five years) that were approved by the town board on Oct. 2. Also left out of the equation were some salary and overtime costs.
“I would still consider that the town, over the course of 10 years, would be saving money,” Rebecca Hansen, the town administrator, said on Monday.
She said the bond and the software costs weren’t included in the May document used to craft the first press release because they weren’t yet known. She said the $1.5 million bond, while it doesn’t show up in the town’s 2025 capital plan, was part of “an ongoing capital project to renovate the dispatch room” that began in 2024.
In 2024, the capital plan included $75,000 to “renovate dispatch room” by installing “soundproof panels, a phone bank, and wiring upgrades.”
Still, in September, a second press release announced the town would begin dispatching fire and E.M.S. calls for the Springs Fire Department and Sag Harbor Village (starting Feb. 1, 2026); the $2.5 million savings number was repeated.
“When we did the math over 10 years, we found by bringing it inhouse that we can save taxpayers $2.5 million over the length of the contract,” said Chief Sarlo, in his interview. “We couldn’t fathom charging our taxpayers extra while our fire districts were also paying the village close to a million.”
Marcos Baladron, the East Hampton Village administrator, disagreed with the town’s budgetary assessment.
“The numbers don’t lie — but apparently, the calculators over there need new batteries,” he wrote in an email. “The town isn’t saving $2.5 million over 10 years; by our estimation, they’re actually running about $3 million in the red when factoring in their recent spending. The village’s offer was the best from day one — and they’re just realizing it now. Unbelievably, they’ve just spent four times our final offer, and that number will continue to grow.”
“As I’ve said from the start, the town never budgeted to take its own 911 calls — that choice was driven by frustration, not facts, after their chief building inspector announced that he was joining the village in March. The town board has received very poor advice. As of today, they’ve spent more money than they needed to, hastily entered into an arena they know very little about, only to steal the village’s long-standing 911 contracts out of spite. As the great American poet Taylor Swift once said: When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”
(On March 21 the village passed a resolution making Joseph Palermo its new chief building inspector, after he decided to leave his position as principal building inspector with the town.)
If the idea that a single employee could lead the town to take on such a huge responsibility seems incongruous, at least the timing was right. Less than two weeks after Mr. Palermo was hired by the village, the town hired five new dispatchers. Chief Sarlo said he hopes to add two more in 2026, to bring his total dispatch staff to 19.
“Given the longstanding relationship, and the massive amount of support and capital invested by the town in the overall emergency services communication system, we had hoped the process would have played out differently,” he said, indicating that he wasn’t eager to take on full dispatching responsibilities.
The first contract the village offered the town for its service would have cost the town $1.5 million a year over five years. When the town balked, the village came back with $800,000 per year over 10 years, and different terms.
“Their first offer would have had almost a zero cost to village residents to maintain a dispatch staff. Their second offer would have covered nearly 73 percent of their dispatch personnel. They have to have a body there anyway” to handle village dispatch, he continued, “so why are Sag Harbor, the fire districts, and us expected to pay for that high of a percentage of their total personnel costs?”
Mr. Baladron said that far from being a money grab, the village was simply trying to recoup some of the costs to its taxpayers, who had been shouldering the entire cost and full liability of the service.
At the end of 2024, with the understanding that it would receive the service free for only one more year, and that the two municipalities would agree on a cost, the town signed a “hold harmless” agreement with the village.
“It is disappointing the baseline for cost analysis of a long-standing shared service could not be agreed upon,” said Chief Sarlo. “Formulas for percentage of workload, or how much personnel time is actually spent on specific tasks related to the services being provided were never hashed out and taken into consideration.” While the village viewed call volume as the key metric, the town saw radio dispatch airtime as key.
Despite their many disagreements, Chief Sarlo says the town will be prepared for the added workload come Jan. 1.
“We have been in consistent contact with Suffolk County 911 coordinators to ensure the routing of calls and technical aspects of the system are all updated appropriately,” he said.
He added that his chief dispatcher, Steve Blanchard, has been communicating directly with P.J. Cantwell, who will be taking over for the departed J.P. Foster, who was chief village dispatcher from 2017 until his retirement this year and is now running as the Republican candidate for town board.
“They’ve sat next to each other at the last two fire dinners, and they have regular discussions about how we’re going to do this,” said Chief Sarlo. He expects Mr. Blanchard and some of his other dispatchers will sit in to train with village dispatchers.
In an interview with The Star in early October, Mr. Foster questioned whether the town would be ready for the new responsibilities.
“If you think you’re going to flip a switch and say ‘We’re E.M.D. [emergency medical dispatch] proficient,’ you’re out of your mind,” he said.
“We’ve had E.M.D. certifications for a while,” said Chief Sarlo. “Now, we’re just stepping it up with ProQA, which is online.” (ProQA is one of three software packages used to manage dispatch calls.) He said training was ongoing.
Emergency medical dispatch is more labor-intensive than police dispatching. While a police call usually ends with sending officers to a scene, a 911 call requiring an ambulance requires dispatchers to remain on the phone until help arrives. In the meantime, they may be tasked with walking a caller through any emergency situation from a birth to a death.
Construction has yet to begin on upgrades to the town’s decades-old dispatch room, but Chief Sarlo said it was imminent.
The town board awarded Ronald Webb builder the nearly $800,000 construction contract on Sept. 16.
“Is it a heavy lift? And is it a change? Yes,” Chief Sarlo said. “It’s going to be busy. We felt like in the long run, we’ve always understood and been cooperative in the idea of shared services and potentially consolidating the radio rooms.”
“We all listen to the same radio. They’re monitoring each other’s channels all the time,” he said, so his dispatchers understand what goes into the job. While there were some technical aspects about the village’s mapping system, used to help fire districts, most of it is the property of the fire districts.
“It’s just a matter of allowing access to it and transferring it,” Chief Sarlo said. “I would assume that in the spirit of cooperation of public safety there would be no issues with that. Despite some of these disagreements or political wranglings, we’ve never seen any issue with the day-to-day workings of public safety, nor do we expect that.”