October of 1999 marked the
beginning of a joint venture between the City of
Loveland and Symmes Township. After careful
planning, a local public safety communications
center was opened to serve the residents of
these two areas. While partially fueled for
economic reasons, this venture was also an
outreach to the citizens in an effort to provide
direct access to the public safety providers.
Lessons
learned during the tornado of 1999
further compelled public safety managers to find
alternative means of communications. Our overall
goal was to provide our residents and
professional users with a higher level of
customer service while at the same time being
conscientious of our economic concerns. Once the
system was area with telephone stickers and
information. Within one year of beginning our
operation, we assumed responsibility for the
entire public safety communications needs for
the City of Loveland and Symmes Township. Since
then we have steadily increased our services
offered to the residents and public safety
users. Residents now have confidence in the system and utilize it
for many public safety needs, not just
emergencies. We process vacation requests,
neighborhood block watch information and many
other community activity requests. Our yearly
volume exceeds 30,000 requests for service. The
fruits of our labor that we enjoy are an
increased service level to our residents.We now
track data that before had gone unnoticed. A
name and license plate database of designed and
implementation began, a rigorous publicity
campaign began. All departments involved went to
our users to offer this new service. There were
two direct mail campaigns and several newspaper
and local publication articles explaining the
operation. We sought out homeowner and
condominium organizations as well as our schools
and health care facilities. On two separate
occasions, our firefighters went door to door to
each business and residence in our contacts is
being established. Localized coordination of
crime information and activity is more readily
shared amongst the patrolman of our departments.
Citizens are greeted with persons who work in
this area, and are familiar with the
idiosyncrasies of our neighborhoods. Their
houses are being watched through our vacation
watch program. Officers and fire fighters
receive more specific information and have not
lost any safety services. All the while the City
and Township administrations are seeing positive
economic trends supporting their decisions to
venture into this field.
