Dispatch dispute — Upton City Council takes issue with joint powers board

The town of Upton and the Weston County Dispatch Joint Powers Board are currently in a dispute over communication tower fees.

At the Dec. 2 Newcastle City Council meeting, Police Chief Derek Thompson told the council about a letter he had received from Upton City Clerk Kelley Millar. The letter said that the Upton Town Council has a few grievances with the joint powers board.

According to Thompson, the board received a bill for Upton’s radio tower, which is rented to the town by Advanced Communication Systems of Newcastle.

“(Upton hasn’t) really communicated with us other than to say that we should pay for their radio tower, … and they pretty much demand that in this letter,” Thompson said.
According to Millar, when Upton received its August bill from Advanced Communications Systems, the rental cost for the tower had
more than doubled, increasing from $50 to $122.

“When a bill doubles or triples like that, we are always asking questions,” Millar said.

In an interview, Weston County Sheriff Bryan Colvard speculated on the likely reason for the rental rate increase. Advanced Communications Systems is a private company owned by Dick Klinker and Kelly Stith. According to Colvard, Klinker used to do all the associated radio and antenna maintenance and
had not previously increased the tower rents in the more than 10 years that Colvard has been sheriff. Colvard believes this was because Klinker was being paid for the maintenance work.

“Since he’s no longer doing radio work, I think he felt
that he should bring the tower rent to what it should be,” Colvard said.

Millar reported that she had contacted Advanced Communications Systems and was informed that the joint powers board had decided that each entity would pay its own tower rental fees. This surprised her.

“That information hadn’t gotten to us,” she said.

Upton’s understanding is that such costs are to be paid by the board as per the contract agreement, and Millar asserts that the language of
the contract supports this understanding.

“The joint powers agreement says ‘all dispatch-related expenses.’ It doesn’t say part. It doesn’t say percentage of. It says all dispatch,” she said.

The agreement, which was supplied to the News Letter Journal by Millar, states that the board “shall provide emergency communications to all citizens of Weston County at a prorated cost to the Participating Agencies, as follows: City of Newcastle, 50%; Town of Upton, 13%; and, Weston County, 37%.”

However, according to Colvard, who sits on the five-member board with Thompson, Upton’s assertion is incorrect.

“I don’t think anybody in that group of five board members believes (the tower rental fees) should be the responsibility of dispatch. It’s more of an entity responsibility,” he said.

Colvard also explained the board’s reasoning for its stance.

“(The tower is) an end-user scenario. In the sheriff’s office, I might have 25 radios in my patrol vehicles, and the Upton Police Department might have three. The joint powers board would probably not pay to purchase new radios for patrol vehicles or other end-user kind of stuff,” he said.

This sentiment was echoed at the Dec. 2 Newcastle City Council meeting by Thompson, who also used radios as an example of a dispatch-related expense that, like the tower rental fees, the board considers the responsibility of each entity.

Both Thompson and Colvard also brought up the proportionality of equipment used by each entity. They noted that both Newcastle and the county have more equipment than Upton, including towers, and suggested that if such end-user items were included in what is paid for by the board, then Upton would need to pay more than the 13% it is currently paying for the management of the dispatch center.

“We pay for our own tower (fees). Upton needs to pay theirs,” Thompson said.

Millar’s letter also took the board to task for rejecting Upton’s designated replacement for former Upton Police Chief Susan Bridge. Millar said that Bridge had relayed to the Upton Town Council that she had designated Upton council member Justin Norman to replace her on the joint powers board and had informed that group of her choice. According to Thompson, however, the board was never informed about Norman taking over for Bridge, and the Upton Town Council has since appointed its fire chief, Les Riehemann, as its representative on the board. He attended the board’s Dec. 18 meeting.

Millar’s letter also criticized the board for failing, in July 2024, to provide Upton with a report detailing the board’s financials. Thompson acknowledged that this was an oversight and attributed it to the relative newness of the board, which officially came into being on Aug. 4, 2023.

“It’s so new, and we have so many things still to get ironed out that (the report)
was overlooked. It’s supposed to be getting done as we speak,” he said.