When contract negotiations for 911 dispatching broke down between East Hampton Town and Village last spring, it became clear that the East Hampton Town Police Department would begin taking the bulk of 911 calls in the township from the village.
The village had acted as the main 911 call center, or Public Safety Answering Point, also known as the P.S.A.P., for decades.
The turnover was to occur on Jan. 1, but it has now been delayed for at least a month.
First, the town told the village that Verizon and Suffolk County, who together are responsible for the technical aspects of the transition, preferred the change to occur on Jan. 5.
It did not.
On Jan. 6. when Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez gave her State of the Town speech, she didn’t address the delay directly but said the town would assume primary responsibility for 911 calls “later this week.”
“This transition reflects careful planning, investment in personnel, and a clear focus on making sure help is there when residents need it most,” she said.
Nonetheless, throughout the week there were continuing issues and the transition, once again, did not happen.
By Saturday, P.J. Cantwell, the head dispatcher for East Hampton Village, had received an email from Stephen Blanchard, the head dispatcher for the town, that seemed to put most of the responsibility on Verizon.
This thread was repeated in an email from East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo when he was asked about the delay on Tuesday.
“Due to a 19,000-employee layoff by Verizon in December, as well as technical issues with the routing of calls and verification of addresses, Verizon had to stall the cutover until all such issues are corrected and verified,” Chief Sarlo wrote.
“Our technical team, Chief Dispatcher Blanchard and Communications System Director Schnell, have worked tirelessly to sort through the address verification and routing tables to assist Verizon, and have worked closely with Suffolk County to ensure the process moves along as quickly as possible,” wrote the chief. “Unfortunately, we are now looking at the cutover occurring on or about Feb. 2. We are hopeful it may occur sooner, but that is entirely up to Verizon.”
A spokesperson for Verizon pushed back on the layoff theme: “We did not lay off 19,000 employees,” he wrote. “That’s wrong. In November, we notified about 13,000 employees that their roles are being eliminated.” He added that job reductions were unconnected with the call-routing issues.
East Hampton Village Police Chief Jeff Erickson, tasked with staffing his dispatch room, said he’s been left in the dark.
“I reached out to Verizon because I had no communication from the county,” he said. “I was able to speak with our Verizon dispatch contact, who spoke with me candidly about where we are with the transition.”
“He told me the first call he got about the transfer was on Dec. 10,” he said. “But Verizon doesn’t do much work between Dec. 16 and Jan. 4, which is why the original date changed to Jan. 5. In other words, they had about six days, from Dec. 10 to Dec. 16, to get this done.”
A spokesperson from Verizon would not confirm the date provided to the village.
“That is simply not accurate,” Chief Sarlo wrote in an email. “The county coordinator for 911 has been working on this with Verizon for quite some time, as far back as June.”
“December 10th was likely a meeting date between the county and Verizon to finalize some of the last details in the process,” he continued. “It appears, due to the village being the primary answering point for all townwide 911 incoming calls, there were issues with phone numbers and residences needing to be coded properly, as either town or village locations, moving forward, in order to ensure accurate routing: a very technical and behind-the-scenes aspect of this which took some time for Verizon, with our assistance, to sort through the updated mapping. Verizon may have pushed this through and let the corrections be made after the cutover; however, they were not comfortable with that.”
