A celebrated example of interjurisdictional cooperation seems to have unraveled this week as Burlington’s municipal leaders abruptly bowed out of a partnership with Alamance County to set up a consolidated 9-1-1 center.
The city effectively slammed the receiver on this joint venture on Monday when city manager Craig Honeycutt briefed Burlington’s city council about a financial impasse that has recently cropped up in this endeavor.
Honeycutt’s update concerned the county’s ongoing efforts to renovate of a former industrial building that it acquired within Burlington’s municipal limits to house its own 9-1-1 operators as well as Burlington’s now separate bank of emergency dispatchers.
In a subsequent interview with The Alamance News, Honeycutt recalled that the county had originally undertaken this project thanks to a $15 million grant that it got from North Carolina’s General Assembly in 2021.
“It was our understanding that this all would be covered by the $15 million,” the city manager went on to concede. “But we’ve been working with the county on this for three years, and the cost estimates keep going up.”
Honeycutt added that this once amicable arrangement finally reached its breaking point when the county demanded that Burlington absorb the full cost of a “hardened” sever room, whose projected expense is hovering around $1.3 million.
“We received a request for the $1.3 million a couple of weeks ago,” Honeycutt elaborated, “and I told [county manager] Heidi [York] that I’d bring it to the council on Monday.”
The city manager ultimately shared this development with the council’s members when they gathered together that evening for their latest regularly-scheduled work session.
At the tail end of this meeting, Honeycutt offered the city’s elected leaders a synopsis of the tug-of-war with the county over the server room’s security.
“The county stated that they felt this was an unnecessary cost,” he recalled, “and they asked that, if we feel that strongly about it, we should pay for the $1.3 million upgrade on our end.”
Honeycutt noted that the city had already agreed to spend $500,000 to run fiber optic cables to the new 9-1-1 center. He insisted, however, that the city is not in a position to absorb an additional $1.3 million. He went on to warn the council that this financial imposition would very likely be followed by others as the venture continued.
“We would like to recommend to the city council,” Honeycutt added during the work session, “that, since this has been a direct Alamance County emergency management project…we inform the county that we will not be participating because we have not budgeted these costs.”
The city manager’s proposal struck Burlington’s mayor Jim Butler as something of a no brainer.
“We’ve walked along with them on this journey this entire time,” Butler said during the work session. “But we don’t have the $1.3 million budgeted…and we’re fully functional [at the city’s existing dispatching hub]…So, I think this is in everybody’s best interest at this point.”
The rest of the council ultimately followed the mayor’s lead, and Honeycutt agreed to share the group’s consensus with his counterpart at the county’s headquarters.
It didn’t take long for the council’s decision to reach the county’s board of commissioners, who kicked off their own meeting in Graham just as Monday’s work session wrapped up in Burlington.
Shortly before the commissioners adjourned their 3 1/2 hour proceedings, county manager Heidi York notified them about the breaking news from Burlington’s elected leaders.
“We heard that Burlington is pulling out of our co-located 9-1-1 center,” York said, “and we are reassessing what that looks like going forward.”
The county manager’s revelation touched a sore nerve for John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, who grumbled about Burlington’s “awkward” refusal to synchronize its emergency communications with Alamance County.
Honeycutt has nevertheless assured The Alamance News that he and his colleagues have been carrying the water for the entire county in the other areas of emergency communications. He observed, for example, that the city has led a lobbying campaign to secure $7 million in federal funds for a single computer-aided dispatching system that would serve all of the emergency services in Alamance County. He added that the city has already won over U.S. Representative Valerie Foushee and may be on the precipice of a breakthrough with U.S. Senator Thom Tillis.
“We feel like we have a commitment,” he added expectantly.
Honeycutt went on to observe that the council’s decision to pull out of the county’s new 9-1-1 center doesn’t necessarily rule out the city’s eventual move to this facility.
“We have not closed the door on co-location,” he added. “We told them to continue designing the 9-1-1 center for co-location. But with all the other costs that we have at this time, we can’t participate in it, right now.”
