During what was likely the most contentious meeting in its history, the usually little noticed Webster County Telecommunications Board voted on Nov. 29 to move ahead with hiring IXP to manage the day-to-day 911 dispatching operations.

The decision to enter contract talks with the Princeton, New Jersey, company was hotly criticized during the meeting and the board’s chairman, Fort Dodge Assistant Police Chief Cory Husske, was on the receiving end of most of the verbal barrage.

While criticism of Husske has continued, the concept of hiring IXP did not start with him.

It started with Fort Dodge Mayor Matt Bemrich.

”I’m the one that found IXP,” Bemrich said.

”He didn’t find IXP,” the mayor added. ”I did. If you want to be mad at somebody, be mad at me.”

Bemrich said he learned of IXP through his own research, and then asked Husske and Fort Dodge Police Chief Roger Porter to investigate the possibility of working with that company. He said he approached Porter and Husske with the idea in May or June.

Bemrich noted that under the Envision 2030 strategic plan, improving public safety is a top priority and the City Council ranked it as the No. 1 priority for a few years. As a result, he said, improvements were made in the police and fire departments. And this year, the Fire Department assumed all responsibility for the ambulance service once provided by UnityPoint Health — Trinity Regional Medical Center.

”We were working on all these things, but here’s a vital piece of it we never really looked at,” he said, referring to 911 dispatching.

A full assessment of the dispatch system had never been done, he said.

The 911 dispatchers are not employees of the city or of Webster County. And the management of the system has historically been traded off between the Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department.

Bemrich said he’s heard a ”a lot of grumbling” about the dispatch system, so he decided to look for ways to improve it. He said he looked for solutions that could be implemented internally and those that could be implemented with help from an outside source.

”It’s evident to me that we need to do something different with dispatch than what we’ve been doing,” he said.

He said he found other companies that operated dispatch centers, but they were security businesses that dispatched their own guards. None of them had the kind of expertise that IXP did, according to Bemrich.

”This is a company that looks to me like they know what they’re doing,” he said. ”The skill set that they bring, the industry expertise that they bring, is something that we haven’t had for a long time.”