Routt County and the city of Steamboat Springs are tentatively moving forward with a new cost-sharing agreement that will fundamentally change how the county’s emergency dispatch center is funded, easing the county’s financial burden and ensuring more equitable support from the communities served.

County Manager Jay Harrington presented the latest plan to the Steamboat Springs City Council at its Nov. 25 meeting, outlining a three-year phased model that will see the city and other local agencies shoulder a portion of the dispatch center’s operating costs, while the county retains management authority and still covers approximately half the expenses.

The Routt County Emergency Communications Center, established in 1990, has long been funded through a percentage of property taxes, with additional support from a statewide E911 surcharge. 

The center provides dispatch services for all nine local agencies, including the Steamboat Springs Police Department and Steamboat Springs Fire Rescue, having operated under this model for decades. 

Rising costs for equipment and technology at the center — as well as significant staffing issues — have made the current funding model unsustainable, however, prompting county officials to explore alternatives, Harrington said.​

“We have in the last 18 months made quite a few operational changes at the dispatch center,” explained Harrington at last week’s council meeting. “We’ve tried to pay (dispatchers) closer to what we pay our jailers. We also have created differential pay, changed up scheduling.”

“Only one of our dispatchers lives in Steamboat, and one lives in Oak Creek — everyone else lives in Hayden and Craig,” he continued. “We’ve lost quite a few dispatchers who, when you’re working a 12-hour shift and you have an hour commute on both ends of it, and you’re doing four days straight of that, it’s not really productive, and also puts a big tear on the family life.”

The county has also created a new satellite dispatch center in Hayden to make commuting easier for staff, he added. 

“It’s really tough work. It’s one of the few jobs where you get the emergency in your lap, and you often don’t know how it’s ended,” Harrington told council. “So we have dispatchers who say, ‘A baby needs CPR,’ and they’re talking someone through the CPR, but they don’t know if the baby lives or not. That’s the type of toll that our dispatchers have.”

The emotional burden of the job, in conjunction with long shifts and commuting pressures, has led to high staff turnover and retention challenges, he explained. 

Harrington had presented a potential new way to fund the dispatch center to the Steamboat Springs City Council and Routt County commissioners at a joint meeting in May, introducing the idea of dispatch service fees and increasing E911 fees.

Currently, Routt County charges a standard $2.12 to every landline and cellphone in the county per month for E911 funding, totaling $25.44 annually per phone line. 

Harrington said at last week’s council meeting that on Nov. 19, the county received unanimous approval from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission to raise the line fee from $2.12 to $4, matching Pitkin County’s per-line fee, the highest of any county in the state. 

While the E911 fee increase will help mitigate the financial strain on the county caused by federal spending cuts — nearly a third of the county’s budget comes from state and federal funding, said Harrington — that alone is not enough to fully meet the operational needs of the short-staffed center.

The remaining need for financial support has led county officials to propose a three-year cost-sharing model to implement dispatch fees that would take full funding responsibility off Routt County and place roughly half of it on local agencies.

Harrington noted during an early-August Steamboat Springs City Council meeting that currently, the Routt County dispatch center is one of four in the state that does not utilize dispatch fees for funding and is responsible for the cost of all municipality dispatch calls.

Under the proposed agreement, through 2028, Routt County will cover about 50-51% of the dispatch center’s total costs, with the remaining 49-50% to be paid by the agencies using the service, based on their call volume. 

“Within the state of Colorado, about 95% of the dispatch centers have some sort of cost-share based on usage,” said Harrington.

The city of Steamboat Springs, which accounts for more than 60% of the center’s call volume, will see the highest share of the cost burden, compared to the other municipalities that may participate. 

“Close to 60% of the property tax the county collects is within (Steamboat) city limits, and that probably tracks on the usage of a lot of the services that we provide,” Harrington said. The figures were later confirmed by city Finance Director Kim Weber.

The first $30,000 of each entity’s annual dispatch fee will be covered by the county, ensuring that more modest users, such as North Routt or the town of Yampa, are not financially overburdened, Harrington said

Routt County’s push for cost-sharing is also driven by broader fiscal stressors, including reductions in federal and state funding and the need to maintain core services like human services and road maintenance. 

The county has taken steps to diversify revenue, including adding a lodging tax and a surcharge on day park passes, said Harrington, but these changes are not enough to offset the entirety of funding pressures.​

The county has submitted an intergovernmental agreement to the city for review, and both parties will continue to work through the details. 

The IGA will come to council for approval in the near future, said City Attorney Dan Foote. Once executed, the city will undergo annual budget appropriations for its portion of the costs through 2028. 

“I would just say that this is fantastic, and I think this is part of the step of working as a partnership with the county,” said Councilor Michael Buccino at the close of the discussion. “They were obviously hit with some funding deficits that the federal government went through, and this is how we partner up.”