LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Local emergency officials believe a new, unified 911 dispatch center in the northwest valley will improve response and coordination among agencies.
I spoke with Clark County Fire Chief Billy Samuels about how this new facility could make for a swifter response in your time of need and what sparked the idea for this inter-agency collaboration.
The Red Rock Communications Center will be built at the southeast corner of West Deer Springs Way and North Shaumber Road. It comes after the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept. identified an opportunity with the Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Clark County Fire Departments to bring their 911 services together under one roof.
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I asked Clark County Fire Chief Billy Samuels what spurred the idea for this collaboration, and he said it's something leaders have been considering for quite some time.
"After 1 October, there was a huge gap in communications between Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the fire departments," Samuels said.
"If we were all in one building, it would solve a lot of our problems," he went on to say.
I asked him why now, since this is an idea that's been discussed for nearly a decade. He said the timing felt right, with good relationships between all the agencies right now. He added, it takes time to come up with design and funding, especially for an undertaking this big.
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"When you come down to cost, land, truly putting that project forward, it's just a lot of work, a lot of details, and then making sure it's right. We can easily go build something tomorrow but is it really going to meet our needs 20 years from now?" Samuels said.
The facility will be funded in part thanks to a new 911 surcharge that leaders have already approved. Samuels said that amounts to an initial $0.50 surcharge on landlines and cell phone lines starting April 1, 2026, with higher fees for trunk lines. The fee for landlines and mobiles will gradually increase by $0.10 each year, eventually reaching a maximum of $1 per line.
He said not only does the law now allow for the revenue from that surcharge to be used to construct facilities, but it can also be used for other departmental needs as they work to bring 911 dispatch into the digital age.
"It can be used for training, it can be used for licensing and infrastructure," Samuels said.
Officials have been touting these plans, saying the new facility could make for quicker emergency response. I asked Chief Samuels about the gaps that exist and how exactly this new center might help with response times.
"When you look at the way our dispatch model is, with Las Vegas Metro being our PSAP, our public safety answering point, that's the one that if we call 911 right here, they're going to say, 'Police, fire, or medical?' And then once they get that, then they have to transfer that call, if it's fire or medical, to the combined communications center. So just that right there, there's a gap," Samuels said.
To provide some context, Samuels explained to me how the current 911 dispatch works across the agencies involved in this project. He said right now, the Clark County, North Las Vegas, and Las Vegas Fire Departments have a combined communications center and LVMPD has its own separate police dispatch. By bringing dispatch for these 4 agencies together under one roof at this new facility, Samuels said this could cut down on transfer times — and when it comes to emergency response, each second counts.
Officials say this new center will also add an additional layer of security, ensuring there's not a single point of failure, should anything happen, by supplementing existing dispatch operations.
It comes after existing vulnerabilities in the current system have been exposed in recent years, like in 2024 when a fiber line was accidentally cut in Missouri and caused 911 outages in Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota.
"I wish we could say it was just that one incident. We've had several since then that actually affected us," Samuels said.
Samuels said they had stop gaps like reverse 911 and SOS 911 during those outages, but this new dispatch center and the upgrade from analog 911 to Next Generation 911 will help immensely in providing another layer of assurance. Next Generation 911 is a digital system that allows for text, photos, and video, and also provides better location accuracy and disaster resilience.
"If we don't get calls, if the general public can't call 911 and there's no one there to answer it because we have a gap in our system because we're on an analog system, then that's a problem for all of us," Samuels said. "Any heads of departments in the fire side or law enforcement side, that is what keeps us up at night."
LVMPD will be responsible for maintaining the new 911 dispatch center and will bill each jurisdiction based on its share of workstations and call volume. The agreement is for 50 years.
