ST. LOUIS—Officials in the city of St. Louis say they’re making progress on closing the vacancy gap for emergency dispatchers, leading to improving statistics for getting calls answered. Still, they say it could still be several months before they have an idea on the workforce they can keep in the posts.

Staffing shortages led to St. Louis having as many as 40 police dispatch openings this year. The issue came into stark relief during a severe weather event July 1.

Officials said there were four people taking calls during this shift on a Saturday, with three fire dispatchers, four EMS dispatchers and five police 911 dispatchers. In total, they handled 1,076 calls between 3-5 p.m., an average of nine calls a minute according to the Department of Public Safety. Of those 1,076 calls, 605 were for emergencies.

St. Louis County authorities reported a similar workload. 

Had dispatch in the city of St. Louis been fully staffed, officials say there would have been 10 police 911 dispatchers working that shift, instead of five.

As of early December, there were 13 police dispatch vacancies and 3 in EMS, down from 10 in July.

“Our most recent statistics show that over 80% of calls are being answered within the first ten seconds, our goal is to get to 90% and we’re well on our way,” St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones told reporters earlier this month.

St. Louis Public Safety Director Charles Coyle said the city has been in a “full-court press” to fill the vacancies but warned there will still be natural turnover.

“We’re going to have turnover from retirees or people that find the job’s not for them. So once we get to that point, and I think this is going to be by the end of the first quarter of next year, we’ll be able to determine what type of staff we’re gonna have with the kind of staff we’ll be able to retain at this point,” he said.

St. Louis County Police told Spectrum News this week that there are eight vacancies in the Bureau of Communications that is authorized to have 94 on staff.

St. Charles County is authorized to have 44 911 dispatchers, and is down 14. Four are about to be hired, a spokesperson confirmed Friday. 

In October, the county council approved a contract with a Colorado firm that provides out-of-town contract 911 dispatch employees as a stopgap measure. The contract calls for as many as eight dispatchers, but the county says there are currently four working under the arrangement. The county’s contract with Moetivations, Inc. is a six-month deal which could be extended under two separate three-month spans.