Blaine County and its cities were set to resolve a dispute last night over how much each government entity will pay to cover the costs of an emergency dispatch system now under the county's umbrella.
We hope they did.
Whenever the dispute is settled, Blaine County needs to conduct an analysis of what went wrong with communication among the various government entities to ensure that it doesn't happen again.
Hailey, Bellevue and Carey all claimed that they were surprised when they received bills for shares of costs based on the number of emergency calls each city generates each year. Blaine County Commissioners claimed that they were surprised that the cities were surprised.
In the middle of all this surprise is a governing board of public employees, medical personnel and a single elected official. All were appointed by agreement by the county and the cities. The single elected official on the board, the Blaine County sheriff, is not in charge of the emergency dispatch system.
The appointed board members—who all served with good intentions—took cover when faced with accepting responsibility for the funding mess. The buck stopped nowhere.
That may be just fine in a Dilbert cartoon, but it's not fine when it comes to life-and-death matters like emergency dispatch. It's got to change.
Either the Blaine County sheriff or the Blaine County commissioners should be responsible for emergency dispatch operations. The system needs people in charge who can be held accountable at the ballot box.
