The Lake Consolidated Emergency Communications Board of Directors appointed Jason Kern as its first executive director Wednesday, with LakeComm set to become fully operational in 2025.
Kern has more than 30 years of local experience in public safety communications and dispatching. He starts his tenure on Jan. 20. He previously served as executive director at Southeast Emergency Communications in Crystal Lake, another regional consolidated emergency communications center.
“As a long-standing resident of Lake County and an industry professional, I’m excited to be a part of this project and to bring a decade’s worth of vision and collaboration over the finish line,” Kern said in a news release.
Plans for the consolidation of Lake County’s 911 services go back more than a decade. LakeComm is the culmination of those efforts, consolidating several regional Public Safety Answer Points (PSAP) into one dispatch center. PSAPs are 911 call centers that handle emergency calls for law enforcement, fire and emergency medical services.
LakeComm will be housed in the Regional Operations and Communications Facility, set to complete construction in January and begin operation in 2025.
LakeComm Board Chair Kevin Timony said the consolidation will require closing seven PSAPs across the county and transitioning their operations to the ROC. The specifics on how to do so seamlessly are still to be determined, he said.
“If we do this correctly, the user shouldn’t know the difference,” he said.
The biggest undertaking ahead will likely be hiring, Timony said. The ROC will need about 100 telecommunicators, and while some can be transferred from the existing PSAPs, Timony expected some attrition from retirements.
LakeComm currently consists of 26 member agencies and will serve about 400,000 people, or roughly half of the county. That excludes several notable members however, with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office and Waukegan, among others, withdrawing from consolidation plans earlier this year.
Timony acknowledged their absence, but said LakeComm will continue “daily engagement and a relationship” with the area’s other dispatch centers. “We all work together,” he said. In the long term, LakeComm plans to bring in more members.
“We hope the sheriff’s office will become a member, we hope Waukegan will become a member, and even those entities on the North Shore currently covered with Glenview,” he said. “The bottom line is, the more entities under one roof, the less time calls are being transferred, the quicker we can get resources to where they need to be.”
Timony praised Kern’s experience and local knowledge, saying he is “excited to welcome Jason.”
“I am confident that Jason’s many decades of experience in the public safety communications field will help LakeComm complete its transition to the new PSAP in 2025, and best position the agency for future success,” Timony said.
