A little over a month after the first anniversary of Lebanon and Laclede County dispatch integration, Laclede County’s E911 Director James Falls said the focus was on keeping the best technology for Laclede County Central Dispatch, building the right team, and having that team become more accurate and efficient.
Following the previously reported-on anniversary of Laclede County taking on city dispatching, the Record interviewed Falls about the department last week.
“Being here now for a year, still focusing on the people aspect, when it comes to our priorities,” he said. “Keeping the best technology we can have, and always trying to push to get more efficient and quicker.”
Falls’s department is under the authority of the Laclede County Commission and advised by an advisory board consisting of the Laclede County sheriff, the chiefs of the LPD, Lebanon Fire Department, and Lebanon Rural Fire Protection District, two city appointees and two County Commission appointees and a Mercy representative (as noted in a September 2024 Record article).
The top challenge on how county and city agencies or department will work together, Falls said, has been having conversations on how to blend the pre-existing systems.
Nothing would stay completely the same, Falls said, but it was important to minimize day-to-day impacts on the ground and ensure changes made were the right ones.
“Change is hard for people,” he said. “And that includes, people, you know, whether they’re in dispatch, law enforcement or fire. And it’s being able to make the right changes. I think, generally speaking, everybody doesn’t mind change, they want to make sure they’re the right changes.”
Falls said Central Dispatch dispatches with two law enforcement agencies, eight fire agencies and acts as the hand-off to Mercy. It has routine contact with city and county utilities as well as the Missouri Department of Transportation.
In addition to the feedback document that the Lebanon Police Department utilizes (discussed in the Record’s Oct. 11 article on the Laclede County 911 Advisory Board meeting), Falls said Central Dispatch has also implemented a formal feedback process for its dispatchers. Central Dispatch has informal channels with its other dispatching agencies to discuss issues, he said.
As for training, Falls said the department has reexamined its training and plans to implement a new structured, phased on-the-job training for the next round of dispatchers hired based on best practices from surrounding dispatch locations.
Each trainee would have one trainer per phase and would have to show a level of competency in individual tasks, he explained. The trainee would continue to take on additional responsibility.
Having a different trainer per phase means that Falls can assign trainers to phases based on their strengths and also avoid exhausting trainers over the course of a year.
Making sure his department had a healthy workforce was important to Falls, and he wanted to grow the experience of and keep experienced team members.
“When I came in, a lot of the team hadn’t even been here a year,” he said. Now, he said, the department did have teammates who had been there a year and by the end of the year would have employees who had been there for two-plus years.
On staff retention, he said the couple of dispatchers who had left this year were not performance related, and the department has also brought on a couple of dispatchers. The dispatch team was dedicated and took their jobs seriously, he said. The department was still interviewing for open positions.
The county’s central dispatch has 10 dispatchers currently, not counting Falls himself and administrative staff, he said.
Falls said that there were four active dispatch consoles, with an additional two console stations with no equipment, which provided flexibility should call volume or work warrant more stations.
The Record also asked follow-up questions from October’s 911 Advisory Board meeting during the interview. Falls said that the department was receiving addressing data from the city, a topic from the meeting.
Hang-up calls were another topic at that meeting, and Falls explained that Central Dispatch had implemented tweaked procedures following agreement from its dispatching law enforcement agencies.
The rule, Falls said, was that dispatch must get verbal, text, or teletype confirmation from a 911 call that the situation is secure. Otherwise, the dispatcher will send a responder.
As for dropped calls, which is when the call enters the CAD (computer-aided-dispatch) but disconnects before the system gets complete phone number or location information, Falls said those were very infrequent. If the system gets a phone number, Falls said the dispatcher would then attempt to make contact with that phone number.
The department’s switch to trigger the county’s storm siren works, as Falls said they triggered the sirens in November. The Record had written in a Nov. 8 article that Central Dispatch had gotten its storm siren equipment running and had tested it successfully.
To reach either the LPD or Sheriff’s Office for non-emergencies, readers can call either the LPD’s number (417-532-3131) or (417-532-2311). Falls said that if one phone number does not work to call the other.
The Record plans to have the agenda for the next 911 Advisory Board meeting on its website when it becomes available. As noted in the unapproved minutes from Oct. 7’s meeting, the next meeting is scheduled for Jan. 6, 2026.
