By Shannon Lukens.

 

Craig Emergency Dispatch services for Colorado State Patrol aren’t being done in Craig at night right now. Dispatch for northwest Colorado is being rerouted to the Alamosa and Montrose Regional Centers at 6:30 p.m. each evening. It started Monday. Here’s Sgt. Patrick Rice with CSP.

“Absolutely, service will continue for all the agencies to include in State Patrol and all the citizens we provide service to up there. The people won’t even notice a difference. It’s going to come just the same. It will just be happening from somewhere else in the state.”

 

Staffing is the issue. There are six dispatch employees in Craig and they need four more to get back to having dispatch locally at night again. Craig Dispatch would need 16 to be at full-staff.

 

Those who apply do have some tests to pass such as a Criticall test, that’s for typing and listening, like a Realistic Job Simulation. There’s also a mental health test, background check, and also drug and medical test. Dispatcher Pre-Employment Testing

 

Sgt. Rice says to watch the Colorado State Patrol website to apply, if interested. They’re working on getting the application live right now. The website is CSP.Colorado.gov.

 

If you do call the non-emergent number at night, it sounds like it is hanging up with a dial tone, but it is a transfer process to the other dispatch center, so stay on the line. They’re working to get that fixed.

 

Sgt. Rice adds, switching to another dispatch center is not uncommon.

“We have several dispatch centers around the state and we are easily able to port calls to continue to provide service to anywhere in the state from any of these centers. The reason for that is staffing could be up or down in a certain area but also natural disasters, or power outages or any other number of unforeseen circumstances. We have designed our system to have multiple backups. So it’s not uncommon for us to shut down one station and move the calls for service to another station, and it happens instantaneously. And it can be ported back just as instantaneously. In this case, we’re doing it for staffing reasons at the current time and those calls are going through Alamosa.”