This week, the new Williamson County Emergency Communications Director, Stephen Martini, started work.
He may save your life one day.
As the county and cities continue consolidating their 911 and emergency response systems at the spiffy new headquarters on 304 Beasley Drive, Martini comes in to push the process to completion. Martini will develop short and long term plans and strategies for Enhanced 9-1-1, direct and coordinate activities of staff engaged in receiving emergency and non-emergency calls and the dispatching of such calls to pertinent agencies.
Since he will direct the people who, if you are lucky, you will never meet; it seemed only fair for you to get to know a little about him and his new role.
Can you sum up what your department does in a few sentences?
I can do it in one: Our job is to get the right resource to the right place right in an emergency. That is exactly what we do.
How has your first week gone?
It has been as crazy as you would expect. A lot of projects we are striving to get complete, and we need to make sure we hit our targets. I set an optimistic, some have said aggressively optimistic, date of late fall for the consolidation of the city of Franklin dispatch system and of the rest of the county at Beasley by then. It may be, you know, December 20th, but late fall. The radio consolidation, which includes all of the county, will take considerably longer. Fall of 2017.
*Spring Hill and Brentwood opted to not move their dispatch/emergency communications centers to Beasley Drive.
What is the biggest challenge you face?
The biggest challenge to me is coordinating the relationships between all of the various public safety telecommunications that are employed by the county or were previously employed by the city of Franklin, and those folks that we are still advertising for and hiring now and into the future. And combining the 12 county dispatchers and eight Franklin dispatchers. Including myself, we have 38 full time positions, eight currently vacant.
I need to make sure everything is in place, make the switch live. Seconds save lives, so the big thing is making sure the facility at 304 Beasley is capable and ready to receive dispatch operations ASAP as I want to make sure we are ready to go -measure twice and cut once.
Tell me about yourself and your family.
I live in Spring Hill, and worked as the Dispatch Director for the City of Brentwood for the past three years. My wife, who I met in college at the University of Mississippi, attend Briggs church. We love it, and love to travel as much as we can. We were in Seattle, where I grew up, last month. Before working for Brentwood I worked as a reporter at the Review-Appeal, right out of college, then Dave Ramsay, before getting into public safety communication in Chattanooga. Then I was hooked.
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