False alarms are costing the City of Auburn and its police department plenty.
In 2007, 2,500 false alarms went off in the city and Auburn Police officers responded to 1,800 of them, costing the city more than $550,000.
And though the city received $35,000 from fines and first-time license applications, it was a comparative drop in the bucket compared to what it was spending.
Auburn Police Commander Larry Miller told the Municipal Services Committee last week that the police department and the city attorney’s office are now proposing to stiffen the rules governing false alarms.
“I brought this to your attention because our current ordinance does not address our need to solve the false alarm calls,” Miller told the committee as he presented an early draft of a highly-detailed, 24-page ordinance. “There are things in here that really help in reducing the false alarms.”
Here are a few of the recommendations:
• A charge of $100 for each false burglar alarm, $200 for each false holdup, robbery or panic alarm. Without this provision, Miller said, the city would not be able to recover its losses.
• Require the alarm companies to train all of their operators sufficiently to limit the number of mistakes. It would require all alarm users or alarm companies before they call 911 to make two calls – the first to the location of the alarm, the second a follow up to a second line or a cell phone to try to get hold of somebody to determine whether the alarm is valid.
“Frequently, a lot of people will trip their alarm going out their door to work not realizing it,” Miller said. “That second call goes into their cell phone. So a lot of those calls to 911 will stop with the second call.”
• Installers of new panels would have to incorporate new technologies into the control panels to cut the number of false alarms. It would not require a modification of existing panels.
• A $24 residential and commercial annual registration fee and $12 senior discount.
• Outsource administration of the alarm program.
Miller said the city studied existing ordinances in Olympia, Pierce County and Redmond.
Miler estimated that some 60 percent of the false alarms are home alarms, but added the city did not know how many alarms have been installed throughout the city. While more are found on commercial sites, he said, there are more residential alarms.
Auburn High School, for example, just topped 60 false alarms for this year alone, Miller said, most of them from visitors and groups not familiar with the school’s codes and system.
Committee members weighed in.
“What I really like about this ordinance is that instead of trying to recover our costs by just transferring the cost to the alarm owners, what we’ve done is we have made it more stringent so they will avoid false alarms,” said Committee Chair Gene Cerino. “This ordinance makes it more possible to avoid as many of these false alarms as possible.
“So if the homeowner with an older system reads this and knows this, they are going to know that it might be critical to them to either upgrade or be very careful about the use of their system,” Cerino said.
Committee member Bill Peloza wondered how many would read the highly detailed proposal.
“That sounds great on paper, but is every owner going to read all this? I doubt it. I looked through this thing, and man, it is confusing, because there is so much to it. This looks to me like an administrative nightmare, it really does.”
“It will be outsourced, and the registration fee will be easily be built into the cost collected by the alarm company and paid to the company that we would outsource to manage it,” said Auburn Police Chief Jim Kelly. “It would shift quite a bit of the work.”
