Tucson officials say Prop. 414 would help hire 911 operators, decrease wait times for emergency calls

The city of Tucson’s 911 response center has an operator shortage. Officials hope funding from Prop. 414 will allow them to hire more staff and improve technology.

When you dial 911, the voice on the other end might be Sandy Bindon. Forty years ago, the Phoenix house Bindon shared with her husband and two young children caught fire, and Bindon watched from outside as emergency workers pulled her husband, trapped inside and overcome by smoke inhalation, from a window and resuscitated him using CPR.

That night, Bindon said, she decided to become a first responder.

“I thought, ‘I want to do exactly what they’re doing. I want to help someone in their time of need,’” she said.

For the past 38 years, Bindon has worked fielding 911 calls. Bindon is part of a team at Tucson’s emergency dispatch center that takes 3,200 calls to 911 per day, plus calls to the city’s non-emergent 311 line and its 988 mental health crisis line.

“It never gets boring,” she said.

Answering emergency calls is a difficult job. The city has struggled to recruit and retain 911 operators for the past few years, said Sharon McDonough, director of Tucson’s Public Safety Communications Department, or PSCD, and though staffing is now better than it’s ever been, it’s still “woefully short.”

The department currently has around 150 staff members but needs around 185, McDonough said, though several years ago it was operating with just 90 employees, and a high turnover rate that has since fallen to average levels.

“The industry overall, across the nation, is short staffed,” she said.

Each call taker in Tucson handles about 130 calls per day. Firefighters, for comparison, go out on around 10 to 12 calls a day, and police officers five to six.

“Their exposure to trauma is really significant,” McDonough said.

PSCD handles dispatching for the police and fire departments in Tucson and South Tucson, in addition to the Northwest, Golder Ranch, Avra Valley,
Picture Rocks, Three Points, Rincon Valley and Mount Lemmon fire
departments.

Last year, the average caller to Tucson’s 911 line waited 17.16 seconds for an answer. This is longer than the National Fire Protection Association’s guideline, which requires 90 percent of emergency calls to be answered within 10 seconds, and the standards of the National Emergency Number Association, which requires 90 percent of calls to be answered within 15 seconds and 95 percent within 20 seconds.

Answering times hit their highest point in December, when callers were waiting an average of more than 23 seconds. On Dec. 9, average wait times exceeded one minute.

After around 30 seconds, people usually hang up, staff said, but they encourage anyone who doesn’t get an answer right away to stay on the line rather than ending the call and redialing, which would put them back at the end of the queue system.

In 2024, more than 100,600 calls were “abandoned,” meaning the caller hung up before they had the chance to speak with an operator.

When the center is understaffed, “more of us have to take more calls,” said Ivan De La Torre, who has worked as a 911 call taker for six years.

Proposition 414, a half-cent sales tax increase on the ballot in a special election on March 11, would add a projected $182 million to the city budget over the next decade to improve 911 operations.

The measure has been blasted by some Tucsonans as a “Trojan horse” for more police funding, because it allots 65.75 percent of the predicted $800 million revenue over 10 years to law enforcement and emergency response, while the remaining 34.25 percent would cover “community resiliency investments” like affordable housing programs and behavioral health.

McDonough says the 911 center needs the funds, which would add 10 new 911 operators at a total cost of $800,000 per year, and 10 new 311 operators at $700,000 per year.

“The more call takers we have, the faster we answer the phone,” she said.

With less staff, there are more calls coming in: calls for Tucson Fire Department have increased nearly 20 percent from 2019 to 2023, and while actual fires and medical emergencies are on the rise, many of the calls are “ancillary,” city officials said.

Prop. 414 would allow the city to bring its 311 line — used to report non-emergencies like graffiti, water waste or noise complaints — up to “the robust level that we think it could be,” McDonough added.

More than half of the calls coming into the city’s 911 center are not emergencies and do not require an emergency police or fire response.

If someone calls during a mental health crisis who does not pose imminent danger to themselves or others, the 911 operator will transfer them to a crisis operator, housed in the same center, who will walk them through the episode and dispatch a mobile crisis team if needed. Crisis operators, employed by an independent contractor, handle about 1,000 calls per month that would otherwise go to 911 operators.

“What we’re really trying to do is take off the burden of calls that really don’t belong there in the first place, so that they can actually focus on those true emergencies in the moment, be available when they need, and have some space in between calls,” said PSCD Deputy Director Geoff Kuhn.

The sales tax, which local officials are calling the “Safe & Vibrant City Initiative,” would drop an additional $4.13 million per year in the dispatch center’s coffers for an upgrade to its call recording and processing system and for new radios, which the city said are both approaching their “end-of-service life.”

The city’s Community Safety Awareness and Response Center, also known as CSARC, located within the dispatch center, would receive an additional $1.37 million per year for technology upgrades and 10 new staff members. CSARC gives the city access to a network of private and public surveillance cameras and license plate readers, though McDonough says the technology is “not up to par.”

Organizers from the “No on Prop. 414” coalition say the proposition’s “expanded government surveillance” spending that includes the CSARC is “regressive” and “misguided.”

In a Sentinel op-ed, organizers Liz Casey, Garland Speight and Tate Williams wrote, “Aside from overall sticker shock, Tucsonans from across the political spectrum oppose the expansion of Big Brother-esque surveillance programs.”

McDonough disagrees with this characterization.

“It’s not a surveillance or Big Brother type of system,” she said. “It allows us, if someone calls in and says, ‘Hey, there’s this big event going on,’ we can look at cameras and give good information to the police officers responding.”

In order to hire more operators — whose starting pay is $18 an hour — the city needs more applicants, so it’s trying to make the job a little more comfortable.

The 911 center has a wellness room, where operators can go to lay under a weighted blanket, a gym staffed with personal trainers, an emotional support dog named Tyson, and an in-house clinician, who will reach out to dispatchers who have recently handled a traumatic call in order to provide support.

“It does take a toll on you,” said Alicia Rubio, who spent eight years working as a dispatcher and call taker and now serves as PSCD’s public information officer. “Nobody’s calling to tell you that they’re having the best day of their life.”

Call takers (who answer the phone) and dispatchers (who deploy police, fire and EMS) all said they had a range of least favorite calls, though most involved babies and children, or people who had suddenly stopped breathing.

“The way that I get through it, or the way that I think a lot of our staff manages it, is that you know that you’re helping somebody, that you are going to save a life during your career. It’s not a matter of if, but when,” Rubio said. “You know that you’re going to hear more bad stuff, but you also know that you’re going to bring life into the world, that you’re going to keep life in the world, and that you are going to get a ‘thank you’ at some point, or somebody’s going to say, ‘You know, I can’t believe that I had to make this call today, but you made it easier,’ and those are the things that make it rewarding.”