Brown County’s 911 dispatcher shortage is relentless. What will it take to fix it?

Experts say departments must boost morale, get creative with hiring and training and address the mental health toll the job takes. Waukesha County offers an example.

The following article comes courtesy of Wisconsin Watch – view the original article here.

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For years, Brown County has struggled to hire people to answer 911 calls and coordinate responses to emergencies. Its emergency dispatch center was among many that grappled with worsened staffing shortages after the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But as the crisis eases nationwide, major shortages still beset Brown County’s 911 center. Despite past pay raises and other efforts, the county is missing more than one in three of its needed dispatchers. Industry experts say boosting pay isn’t enough to attract dispatchers nowadays. Departments must also boost morale, get creative with hiring and training and address the mental health toll the job takes. 

Waukesha County’s 911 center offers an example of how such measures can help alleviate shortages. It placed a laser focus on employee mental well-being and went from over half-vacant to almost fully staffed in two years.

The Brown County vacancies haven’t impacted how quickly dispatchers pick up the phone when residents dial 911 — employees still answer faster than the national standard recommends. But some county leaders are worried that mistakes will be made if the issue continues.

Only one of the five elected supervisors who helm a committee overseeing the county’s public safety operations answered calls and emails for this story. Supervisor Michael LaBouve, who represents most of the east side of De Pere, told Wisconsin Watch the county is following a plan to address the shortage and solving it is “going to take time.”

“I think we’re all seeing progress, so that’s all I have to communicate about that,” LaBouve said. “I feel good about what’s happening.”

But at 19 employees short, the center tallies more vacancies today than it did several years ago when the county first prioritized the crisis, and some are losing their patience. 

During a public meeting in late May, supervisors aired their frustration at the lack of progress. Dispatchers worked a combined 8,600 hours of overtime so far this year, the department said, and they’ve routinely taken to local government meetings to voice their experiences with stress and burnout. 

“Looking at us to go 60, 70, potentially 80 hours and being called in on the days off and 24/7 is just — it’s mind-boggling,” dispatcher Kirk Parker said during a May meeting. 

Money not the answer?

Staffing shortages have plagued the public safety communications industry for years, but the issue peaked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2023, about one in four dispatch jobs across the country were vacant, research by the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch suggested. 

There are still “alarming strains” on the industry, but there are recent signs of progress, said April Heinze, chief of 911 operations for the National Emergency Number Association, a national nonprofit of dispatch industry professionals. Research by NENA shows 74% of centers reported having vacant positions in 2025, improved from 82% in 2024. 

However, those improvements aren’t reflected locally. Brown County was short 19 staffers in early August, according to officials, leaving about 35% of the center vacant. 

“Like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole: as quickly as one issue can be addressed, another issue pops up,” Chancy Huntzinger, Brown County’s director of public safety communications, said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch. 

In 2023, in one of its first major efforts to attract and retain staff, Brown County’s Board of Supervisors voted to allocate over $400,000 for raises, retention bonuses and a starting pay boost. Pay now starts at $24.60 per hour, according to the department. 

But the raises haven’t attracted more staff the way county leaders hoped. The center is currently short more employees than when the pay bumps were approved.

“Obviously, pay is not always the most important thing,” Heinze said. Data from the study NENA completed in May showed the largest affliction for dispatchers across the country is burnout. 

Plus, the pay boost didn’t do much to make Brown County stand out to job seekers. The department’s minimum pay is middle-of-the-pack compared to other northeast Wisconsin counties.

A Flourish scatter chart

Waukesha’s methods show promise

Roughly two hours south, Waukesha County’s 911 agency has made outsized progress in solving its dispatcher shortage. 

When COVID-19 prompted the “Great Resignation,” dozens of dispatchers left Waukesha County Communications Center for higher-paying, lower-stress jobs in public safety technology startups, utility company call centers and other nearby 911 centers.

By October 2023, the center was over half empty. Down over 20 dispatchers, senior staff were forced to pick up call-taking shifts. Staff worked during their time off. Employees regularly picked up back-to-back 12-hour shifts.

“People were starting to feel burnt out, and really it became a snowball effect,” said Gail Goodchild, the county’s emergency preparedness director. “We saw bad attitudes. People didn’t want to come into work. The culture was waning.”

Department leaders realized they needed “all hands on deck” to turn things around, Goodchild said — which they did. According to NENA, they had only two vacancies in July. 

The department did raise pay, bringing the starting hourly wage to $29.44 from roughly $27. This helped, but “wasn’t the leading thing that really turned us around,” Goodchild said. Department leaders also parted with staff they felt “didn’t contribute to a positive culture.” They revamped their hiring and training processes and eased the job requirements. And they introduced an intense focus on dispatchers’ mental health.

Waukesha’s hiring process once heavily relied on CritiCall, a software commonly used in 911 centers that tests potential dispatchers’ skills at multitasking, decision-making, map reading and more. It was determined the test was “weeding people out that would have probably been a really good fit,” said Chris Becker, Waukesha’s communications operations manager. 

“We looked at our numbers in that and determined that there was no correlation between our successful trainees and their CritiCall scores being high,” Becker said. “So we tossed that out.” 

Now, the hiring committee strictly focuses on if a candidate will fit the department’s culture. To ensure people learn the hard skills the exam measures, the department has refined and revamped its training. (Brown County candidates must pass the CritiCall exam to be hired, and the county has not considered changing that, Huntzinger said.)

Waukesha also removed its two-year work experience requirement from the job description to yield more candidates, a move it may soon reverse because it’s seen that having “some of that life experience” is good, Becker said. 

Finally, the county ramped up mental health support to dispatchers. In addition to regular benefits offered in the county’s employee assistance program, it contracted a local mental health provider specializing in first responders. Dispatchers now regularly attend mandatory, confidential 90-minute meetings with the providers, who help employees work through vicarious trauma, a type of trauma common among first responders that compounds when hearing, reading or witnessing distressing events. The grant-funded initiative costs roughly $16,000 for 18 months, Becker said. 

“In case our staff ever gets to a point where they need them, they feel more comfortable to reach out for that help, rather than living with it and burying it and then getting to that point of burnout again,” Becker said.

Brown County has not explored increased mental health support as a method of retention. Staff are encouraged to visit the Public Safety Communications director’s office if they have concerns, and they can receive counseling benefits through the county’s employee assistance program, Huntzinger said. 

“We’re listening to people’s worst days, right? We hang up the phone when the first responders get there, and then it’s left to our imagination to fill in the blanks,” Becker said. “But some of those traumatic calls just don’t go away, and they’ll pop up at random times, or a call three years later will remind you of a call that you took, and you’re right back to that place again. … It’s super important for our staff to have that outlet.”

Looking ahead

After bumping pay, Brown County’s Board of Supervisors requested an independent review of the dispatch center in 2024. The report, delivered in January 2025, made 65 recommendations on how the center could improve operations and its staffing. 

The department has made mixed progress on implementing the recommendations, which vary in complexity, and gives monthly progress updates to the board’s Public Safety Committee.

Per the advice of the consultants, the department introduced employee referral bonuses and now has candidates visit the call center before they interview, rather than after.

The department will also hire “traveling dispatchers” — temporary contractors who will work at the center for six months to cover some shifts, Huntzinger said. She did not answer a question from Wisconsin Watch about how much this will cost the county. 

Next year, the center will introduce a new shift schedule to help it operate more effectively with less staff, Huntzinger said. Though consultants recommended the county’s “unnecessarily complex” schedule be changed immediately, it was delayed following employee pushback. 

The report also suggested the county “substantially expand” partnerships with local education institutions to create a pipeline of candidates. Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, which offers workforce training in emergency dispatch, said it has not been formally assigned  recruitment efforts but it aims to support the region’s workforce needs. 

Miranda Dunlap reports on pathways to success in northeast Wisconsin, working in partnership with Open Campus.