APCO P-39 chair quits comm center on eve of investigation report
The Portland, OR, Oregonian has reported that RoxAnn Brown resigned as director of the Washington County Consolidated Communications Agency on Dec. 12 and then contracted to consult the agency for six months. A week later, a law firm hired to investigate working conditions at the center presented its report to the agency’s five-member board of chief executive officers. The board hired the firm after receiving 16 complaint letters. Nancy M. Cooper, a lawyer with the firm, recommended an audit of the agency’s employment practices directed at ensuring compliance with the law.
The newspaper reported that Forrest Soth, chairman of the agency’s board of chief executive officers and also chairman of a separate 18-member board of commissioners that sets agency policies, said Brown’s resignation had nothing to do with the complaints. The Oregonian reported Brown as saying the same, and that she said she was proud of her work to improve the center’s staffing and technology and of her cooperative relationship with the dispatchers’ union and the agency’s users.
In August, Brown was named chairman of a trade association committee with responsibility to recommend ways to resolve interference to public safety radio communications systems primarily found near Nextel Communications cell sites. Her appointment as chairman of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials’ Project 39 committee is unaffected by her resignation from the county agency.
The newspaper reported that Brown’s salary had been $102,588, and that her consulting contract would pay $8,550 per month plus health and life insurance.
Some of Brown’s consulting projects will involve planning a $13.8 million upgrade to the dispatch center, the use of the 700MHz and 800MHz bands in Oregon and a project to tie Clackamas County’s public safety radio system into Washington County’s.