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The Coffee County Consolidated Communication Center, the county department that answers and dispatches all the emergency and non-emergency calls, has been plagued for well over the last year with nagging phone problems.

While some of those issues have been resolved by the center’s outgoing phone provider AT&T, the building’s non-emergency administrative lines are currently plagued with intermittent failures, according to Communications Center Director Scott LeDuc, who reported the problems at the Dec. 20 meetings of the 911 Board and the Comm. Center Board.

“Some of those admin lines are intermittently failing,” he said. “They could all be working, then they go out. One person is working on a line, and the rest of them don’t work.”

In recent weeks, LeDuc and Deputy Director Robert Jarman have placed at least 25 service calls to AT&T. According to LeDuc, during the last one a technician diagnosed the problem as a grounding issue somewhere in the building. A local electrician was called in and he found that the building’s many lighting strikes had degraded a piece of equipment’s grounding protection. That replaced, the center is waiting on AT&T to return to fix the problem.       

According to LeDuc, the non-emergency lines are not given the priority by the phone company that the emergency lines are. The 911 phones too had problems until AT&T recently replaced those lines with fiber optic lines.

Yet those admin lines are important to the operation of the center. When the center receives a large volume of 911 calls, some calls can roll over to those admin lines. Additionally, the day-to-day calls from law enforcement, fire and other agencies are handled by those lines.

When those lines go out, dispatchers now use a cache of the county’s Emergency Management Agency’s flip phones to handle those calls.

What concerned some at the meeting is that those phone calls are not recorded as are the regular admin lines.

Incoming Chair of the Communication Board, Commissioner Missy DeFord said that it’s a problem that the public calls to the center aren’t getting through.

“I’ve had people tell me that they’d called and called, and (finally) said I give up,” DeFord said. “This is a big concern for me that these admin lines have been down a year and a half… This is a problem for the officers, the dispatchers… and those flip phones are not recorded,” DeFord said, noting the liability issue of official calls being made without the documentation required by policy.

In the 911 Board Meeting, Board Attorney Mike Mahn  cautioned in an unrelated discussion that Hawkins County, Tenn. was found guilty of gross negligence in a suit for allegedly  incorrectly handling a road being out and a resulting driver’s crash. That case was built on recordings of dispatch calls.

DeFord said that those recordings can save the comm. center, a dispatcher or an officer in the event of a suit.

“I’m just not good with (the situation),” DeFord said.

LeDuc agreed, but said that there is little more that he could do that he hasn’t done. He also said the center is in the process of switching its phone and internet service to Ben Loman.

To keep the all those phone lines’ original numbers, Ben Loman will have to port the numbers from AT&T, but according to LeDuc’s conversations with the phone provider, many of the AT&T people who would transfer the numbers are on vacation until the new year.

Coffee County Sheriff Chad Partin, addressing The News’ sister paper the Manchester Times, made a statement to the public that in the interim to call 911 if someone cannot get through on an admin line.

“Those non-emergency numbers that you’re calling for the comm. center, if you’re not getting through, hang up and dial 911,” Partin said.

“Even though it may be non-emergency, until we get through this transition…temporarily, they are not going to be penalized by law enforcement,” he said.

Partin asked that callers try to keep these calls to 911 brief because they still tie-up 911 lines.     

The non-emergency admin lines are the advertised numbers for the Coffee County Sheriff’s Department, Manchester Police and Tullahoma Police in addition to office line for the center. These admin lines are the numbers that many residents still call when they need police or fire.

“A lot of people call (728) -3591 thinking that’s dispatch. We transfer that call and they gets dropped,” Partin said. “They can google my cell phone number. They’re calling me trying to report a break in.”