HomerSimpson

Ridiculous amount of money just to be "allowed" to apply for the job.

I agree too that a municipal employee operation would have been preferable to a private operation, but the reality is that municipalities have been getting so beat up over public employee contracts and pensions that they are gun shy over the prospects of having yet another public employee union to deal with. One of the main issues that the city did not want was that it did not want to deal with any union. It did not want to deal with contracts, pensions and benefits, grievances, etc. The company that took the contract employs only at-will employees, meaning they could be let go for any reason, or no reason at all. No union protections, no grievance procedures, no pre-negotiated salary increases, nothing. These dispatchers will be earning a fraction of what surrounding publicly employed dispatchers will earn. The winners here will be; 1) the company, because they're in it to make money, and 2) the city because they just pay the contracted rate and relieve themselves of all employee and long term contract issues, benefits, problematic employees, etc. The people who are getting the short end of the stick are the employees who are going to earn sub standard wages, and who will have to work under deplorable working conditions where they face the potential for termination for any reason what so ever. If this whole privatization experiment takes off, publicly employed dispatchers are going to start feeling the pain as more and more municipalities chip away at their salary and bennies, or even decide themselves to eliminate and privatize their own dispatch centers. I sure hope I'm wrong, but I think we're seeing the writing on the walls this one.

The unions both negotiated away the dispatch positions in their contracts many years ago. It's taken this long for the city to get around to following throught on civilianizing them. The FD bargained for a brand new fire station and a dozen more FF's in exchange for dispatch, and PD got money, etc. No one "took" anything from either.

The civilian dispatchers that will be hired are going to be people from Danbury and surrounding communities. No one is going to bring in some mythical group of licensed dispatchers from out of state. It's not like there is some sort of dispatcher jump team waiting on standby to move in to take over new territory. Jeez. The company is based out of state, but the people who will work in the comm center will be people from that community. They will hire some people that are already trained and certified, and they will hire some that are not and that will have to undergo the appropriate training and certification process. Connecticut dispatchers must be certified within 1 year of hire at the basic state telecommunicator level. It's not a license, per se, but it is a required level of certification. Civilian dispatchers will earn less than half of what the police and fire dispatchers are being paid now.