County to turn to contract telecommunicators to address staffing shortages

ASHEBORO — The Randolph County Board of Commissioners took action this week to address staffing shortages in the Emergency Services Department.

At its July meeting, the board approved the appropriation of carryover funds to the emergency services department in order to address current staffing shortages in the 911 center.

“In this budget year, we had 35 positions budgeted for the 911 center for telecommunicators,” said Jared Byrd, emergency services deputy chief. “These are the people that are answering the 911 telephone lines and dispatching over the radio for these calls. Of the 35, we have 20 people who are fully trained, fully ready to do the job and seven people in training. So three out of our four shifts do not even have the minimum that we feel is necessary to answer the phone calls.”

The appropriation, which is for $175,000, will allow the department to contract with temporary telecommunicator contract employees to address the 22% vacancy rate in the 911 center.

“These agencies are very similar to travel nurses that were very popular when the hospitals were experiencing nursing shortages,” Byrd said. “There are a couple companies out there that are now doing that for 911 centers and our request is to carry over the money to do that.”

Byrd said most of these employees already would have at least two to three years of experience working in a 911 center and so it would only take a few weeks of on-site training to get them up to speed with how the county operates.

This action isn’t intended to be a permanent solution to the shortage.

“It’s for sure a band-aid,” Byrd said. “We’ve just closed applications and we’re hoping to hire four, five or six in the next couple of weeks. We didn’t budget for travel communicators in our current budget because we hope this is not a permanent fix —  don’t want it to be —  because our staff is way cheaper than hiring contract staff.”

The board also approved the purchase of multiple emergency services vehicles including four ambulances and three Chevrolet Tahoes at a cost of just more than $1.5 million.

Emergency services chief Donovan Davis said all seven vehicles are replacement vehicles for ones in the fleet that have pretty much reached the end of their usable lives.

“We do preventative maintenance every day,” Donovan said. “But when we do take them out of service, we do try to repurpose them within the county first by offering them to other county departments or somebody who might be able to use them. But we don’t want to rely on it as an emergency vehicle when it might break down.”

Finally, the board adopted the fiscal year 2025-26 classification and pay plans.

“The classification plan includes a 3% cost-of-living adjustment and it also includes job title updates that you all have approved throughout the year,” human resources director Jill Williams said.

The Randolph County Board of Commissioners will next meet Aug. 4.