SPECIAL REPORT : * Voters in 1992 OKd a bond measure to upgrade the city’s emergency phone network, but L.A. has years to go before it finishes . . . : Rescuing the 911 System

It was a powerful message: a television ad showing a hand with a gun approaching a door as a woman inside frantically dialed 911, only to get a busy signal.

The ad was part of a successful campaign in 1992 that helped persuade Los Angeles voters to approve a $235-million bond issue to revamp the city’s outdated and overburdened emergency communications system.

Although some vital improvements have been made, two state-of-the-art dispatch centers--the centerpiece of the bond measure--have not yet broken ground. The city finally picked a downtown site for one center last year, but it is still studying an alternative location for a facility in the San Fernando Valley, and has yet to choose a contractor to build either.

The system is now due for completion in 2002--giving the project twice the time it took to build the Golden Gate Bridge.

“We’ve been very concerned,” said Deputy City Controller Tim Lynch. “It’s inexcusable. The crisis is real.”

For the first nine months of this year, 92,342 calls went unanswered, about 6.4% of the total received, according to Los Angeles Police Department figures. During the same period, 75,640 callers waited 20 seconds or more before their call was answered.

The worst year on record was 1995, when nearly one in three 911 calls to the overloaded system went unanswered for at least 10 seconds, and more than 325,000 calls were abandoned by callers.

The improvement has been steady in the last several years, but thousands of calls have gone unanswered and callers have hung up in frustration. The Police Department expects the number of unanswered emergency calls to drop when the new dispatch centers open.

Although the dispatch centers remain designs on paper, improvements have been made on other components of the emergency system, a complex web of computers, radios, and telephones that links dispatchers and police officers in the field. Efforts to hire more operators and set up a telephone number to siphon nonemergency calls away from the clogged 911 system are underway.

Using the bond money, the LAPD has distributed more than 7,500 new hand-held radios to officers and installed a $2.5-million backup telephone system for 911 calls.

As of Sept. 30, the city had spent less than half of the $235 million in bond proceeds.

“While ground hasn’t been broken yet [on the centers], the bond measure was much more comprehensive,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, chairwoman of the Public Safety Committee. “There has been a lot of progress made.”

Several people involved with the project pointed out that the plodding pace actually saved money and allowed the city to take advantage of better technology.

“Basically, when you develop these huge systems, technology is probably one of the only areas where if you delay, it works to your advantage, because technology is moving so fast that prices are going down,” said assistant city administrative officer Terry Munoz, who chairs the steering committee that oversees the project.

Changing Sites for Dispatch Centers

The 911 upgrade, meanwhile, has been hampered by frequent changes in the selection of sites for the new dispatch centers. At least four different locations have been considered for each center, and last year police and fire experts persuaded the City Council to reverse a decision made years earlier to build the downtown 911 center at the LAPD’s Westchester training facility.

That change alone was estimated to cost about $3 million. The downtown facility is now planned for the corner of Los Angeles and 1st streets, near City Hall.

Chick said a recent dispute between the city and a contractor, Motorola, over the design of a mobile data terminal system for police cars convinced her that more oversight was needed. The disagreement was finally resolved, but it caused a delay of more than a year for that piece of the project.

In March, the council adopted a Public Safety Committee report requiring quarterly updates from the panel of city officials now guiding the project. The most recent status report says the current 911 projects are “on schedule and within the overall budgeted funds.” It states that the entire project should be finished by June 2002.

City Controller Rick Tuttle began monitoring the 911 project early on, advising the mayor in a 1994 letter of “the multitude of delays and excuses” hampering several bond-funded programs.

In 1995, Tuttle urged police to tighten management controls on the 911 project. Police officials blamed most of the lag on “cumbersome and exhaustive” review processes and inadequate staffing.

Requests to issue contracts and hire staff for the project often lingered for months before being approved, said Linda Bunker, the LAPD’s project manager for the 911 upgrade, sifting slowly through bureaucratic layers from the police chief and commission to the mayor, the city administrative officer, and the City Council and its committees.

“It can take months, literally months,” Bunker said. “Everybody wants to have their hands on this. . . . The city is ill-equipped to manage these kind of projects in a timely manner.”

The 911 upgrade got off to a slow start, partly because the city was unprepared for the bond’s passage and did not have adequate start-up money or staff in place to begin work immediately. Two previous ballot measures to finance 911 improvements had already failed in 1990 and 1991.

But in the spring of 1992, riots sparked by not-guilty verdicts for four LAPD officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King swept through the city. The upheaval helped convince voters that November that the time had come to upgrade police equipment and fund the construction of two dispatch centers, one for the Valley and one for downtown.

In the years since the bond measure passed, police leaders have said that the project was always envisioned as a 10-year effort. But the bond measure presented to voters six years ago made no mention of a timeline.

The hallmark of the bond issue remains the two dispatch centers. They will replace the cramped quarters of the current 911 center, a former bomb shelter buried four floors underground beneath City Hall East, which flooded in October, causing technicians to shut down the communications system and revert to a backup telephone network.

Competing Locations for Valley Center

At an estimated cost of $18 million each, the centers will be built to withstand an earthquake of 8.3 magnitude, according to police plans. To ease the stress inherent in 911 operators’ jobs, the buildings will offer better air flow, vaulted ceilings and roomier consoles.

In the meantime, the location of the Valley 911 hub--approved two years ago for West Hills, where the city spent $1 million buying the planned site at the corner of Roscoe Boulevard and Fallbrook Avenue--is still being debated. Former City Councilman Richard Alarcon, now a state senator, had urged the city to consider saving money by putting the 911 center in the Anthony Building in Sun Valley.

“The thing that has pulled us off center is looking at the Valley site,” Bunker said. “We have to write reports, go out and visit, attend meetings. That’s all cost us hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of people time.”

The city’s chief legislative analyst and other staff are now studying the Anthony Building as a potential site for the Valley center, a suggestion opposed by the police department, Chick and Councilman Hal Bernson, whose district includes the planned West Hills site.

“We’re throwing out ideas for all kinds of functions to be located in the Anthony Building, and this just happened to be one of them,” said Gerry Miller, the assistant chief legislative analyst.

“We’re all mindful of the fact that we need to proceed as expeditiously as possible.”