WARREN — More than two dozen police and fire chiefs informed the Trumbull County Commissioners Wednesday about what they are calling a “crisis of confidence” over the county’s 911 operations.

The law enforcement and fire officials were brought together to provide them a chance to express their frustrations about the 911 Center’s leadership, its interactions with the various departments and the costs they are paying for service.

There are three pillars of systemic failure at 911, which includes its financial integrity, operational competence and accountability, according to Liberty Police chief Ray Buhala, who spoke on behalf of the county’s police chiefs.

The chief noted the Trumbull County police and fire departments are concerned about what they believe is an arbitrary billing method established in 2023 that charges the departments $7 per call with a 10% flat fee, as well as the practice of double billing for police department calls.

“The formula forces departments to pay based on an outdated high water mark,” he said. “For example, Howland PD’s fee was artificially hiked from $48,250.32 to $75,383, without a corresponding increase in service or current call volume.”

Buhala noted departments were overbilled for 911 calls that were never made in 2023, 2024 and 2025 based on locking in call numbers made in 2022. He noted the departments received fewer calls during those years.

He said police and EMS for certain departments each have been charged for the same calls.

“In 2023 alone, the Liberty Police Department was charged with 1,740 calls that were explicitly for fire and medic,” Buhala said. “So we were double billed. We called and made mention of it, but we had no response.”

He said there has been zero formal changes in its Standard Operational Procedures or active Memorandums of Understanding in the three years since Tacy McDonough has taken over operation of the center.

“There has been a lack of cooperation,” he said. “We’ve had zero input in operational procedures.”

He noted the police chiefs learned from newspaper articles that McDonough was recommending her department no longer wanted to answer 10-digit nonemergency calls.

“If there is talk to offload 200,000 nonemergency calls and maybe we can do this and do that and maybe we can push it back to the township, why are we learning about it in the Tribune,” Buhala said. “I’m a paying customer. I should not read that in the Tribune.”

He noted that police and fire chiefs should be involved in making decisions about the final 911 plan.

Buhala said part of the reason his department agreed to move from the township’s own dispatching center and join the county center was that the county would handle all calls — not just emergency and nonemergency calls.

“The MOU that we signed stated that,” he said. “In my view, as the police chief of Liberty, that’s a broken promise of consolidating dispatches. I was there in 2012 when we made the difficult decision to close our dispatch center.”

He recommended the commissioners should first work to get 911’s operational house in order before focusing on a $6 million investment for a new building.

“I don’t know if anyone has looked at the Mahoning County model. Instead of doing one dispatch center, they now have five satellite centers,” Buhala said.

“All we are saying is the system has been broken for years,” he said. “How do we fix this before we select and move into a new building with the same old problems?”

He suggested that an independent board of police chiefs needs to come in and do a thorough review of exactly what the breakdown has been in the county.

McDonough responded that the 911 final plan was not updated for years before she arrived in Trumbull County.

She said that county dispatchers should not be receiving nonemergency calls.

“We needed to find a way to get them off our dispatchers,” McDonough said.

Commissioner Denny Malloy said it was the commissioners office that decided there must be an effort to reduce the number of nonemergency calls off the 911 dispatchers’ backs because of the work overload they were experiencing.

“We understood the workload on the dispatchers was tremendous,” he said.

He noted that Trumbull County 911 has 18 dispatchers, when they should have nearly 40. Malloy said the 911 Center has not worked properly since former director Tim Gladis left the county in 2005.

“We had an interim director for three-and-a-half years,” Malloy said. “”We should have gotten together 10 years ago.”

Bernard said he did not understand the departments’ signed contracts that said Trumbull 911 would take the nonemergency calls.

McDonough said she did not see the original MOU. She noted Trumbull 911 is now working with an outside consultant to develop a final 911 plan.

“They are working with a billing structure,” she said.

A draft of the 911 plan from the consulting group is expected to be finalized in the next several weeks, according to McDonough.

Commissioner Rick Hernandez said there is a communication problem between 911 and area law enforcement.

Howland fire Chief Ray Pace noted they have a CAD (computer aided dispatching) system that does not work.

“No one is against a good working environment for the employees of 911,” he said. “We all want that. Some of these systems that are currently broken, you fix now.”

McDonough said a new CAD system could cost as much as $1.5 million.

“We’ve updated the servers, updated the 911 recorders, all the computers and monitors, and the radios,” she said. “The only thing we have not updated is the CAD operating system.”

Weathersfield police Chief Michael Naples Jr. agreed the CAD system is a major problem.

“We need to sit down and work together,” he said. “This has been going on since 1993 and we’ve gotten nowhere.”

Naples noted the chiefs in the townships and the cities and the taxpayers can work together to advise what is needed with the Trumbull County 911 system.

“We’re paying the bill,” he said. “We can figure out how to operate it, along with the 911 staff.”

Bernard said moving forward, the commissioners will be working to improve communication between Trumbull 911 and the police and fire chiefs.