Emergency Services Seek Relief: St. Mary’s 911 Center Turns To Contract Dispatchers Amid Burnout

LEONARDTOWN, Md. — An agency built to respond to emergencies is now seeking urgent help of its own.

At the March 17 meeting of the St. Mary’s County Commissioners, Department of Emergency Services Director Jennifer Utz outlined a growing crisis inside the county’s 911 communications center: staffing shortages driven by fatigue, mandatory overtime and employee burnout.

“We have been, like everybody else in the nation, challenged with maintaining staff in our 911 communications center,” Utz told commissioners.

To stabilize operations, county officials approved a plan to bring in up to eight temporary, contract public safety dispatchers through a Midwest-based company, Get Rescued 911. The move is designed to ease pressure on current staff while the county works to rebuild its workforce, a process that could take more than a year.

Even under ideal conditions, filling those roles is slow. New hires require six to eight months of training before they can work independently.

“Our current projections are that we would not become fully staffed until May of 2027,” Deputy Director Kirsten Shea said.

In the meantime, existing staff have been working extended hours to cover gaps, often at the expense of their well-being.

“We’ve had to mandate overtime, excessive hours for our current staff, to make sure that we meet the demands of the citizens,” Utz said. “And so that is the number one driver of our retention rate, or lack of retention in our turnover.”

“We’re seeing a lot of staff burn out as a result,” Utz said.

The job itself adds another layer of pressure. While dispatchers are not physically on scene, the stakes remain high.

“You’re the voice on that line. Getting help to the people, but you can never really see them,” Utz said. “You never can really touch them, and you never can really console them. And that’s a difficult job.”

Commissioners acknowledged the emotional and mental toll, noting the increasing recognition of dispatchers as “first, first responders.”

“They acclimate well to new communities, they learn the geography fairly quickly,” Utz said.

The goal is not just to fill shifts, but to give current staff time to recover and refocus on training new hires.

“This would give us a chance to decompress them so that they can get into our training academy and provide that subject matter expertise,” Utz said.

Officials also hope the additional staffing will restore a better work-life balance, something many employees have gone without.

“When sometimes you’re working five, six out of seven days a week, 12-hour days … that’s where this comes in,” Shea said.

“My sense would be, this would almost be a cost savings, if we can do away with overtime, and bring these folks on,” Commissioner Scott Ostrow said.

More importantly, leaders emphasized the human cost of inaction.

“I hate the fact that we’re here at this point, but I love the fact that we have a resource that we can tap into,” Commissioner Mike Alderson added.

“I would love a ‘one and done,’” Utz said, while acknowledging the uncertainty ahead.

If successful, the temporary support could help the county rebuild a stable, fully staffed communications center and give its current dispatchers something they have been missing: relief.

“At the end of the day, we have to do what’s absolutely best for our citizens,” Commissioner Mike Alderson said.

You can watch the full meeting below from the Department of Emergency Services at 2:19.

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