The Lewis County 911 Executive Board welcomed its new executive director last week, finally filling the post roughly six months after the countywide call center's previous administrator left the position.
Lewis County 911 Executive Director Jeff Hursh attended his first executive board meeting last week after his first day in the role on Monday. The executive board did not officially announce that Hursh had taken on the role ahead of the meeting. However, the board had motioned to extend a salary offer to Hursh during its previous meeting at the end of October.
Jennifer Libby-Jones, the previous executive director of the 911 call center, left the position in May. Since then, the 911 call center’s supervisor, Liz Casteel, has filled in as interim executive director, taking the lead on day-to-day operations and providing reports to the executive board.
Hiring Hursh brings an end to a very up and down hiring process. The Lewis County 911 executive board has seemed close to finalizing the hiring of an executive director a couple of times in the last six months but until now had never closed the deal.
In late September, the executive board rescinded a job offer to another executive director candidate. The board, without naming the candidate in open session, had extended a conditional offer for the position, pending a background check. After a 30-minute closed executive session during the Sept. 29 meeting, the board terminated the hiring process before moving forward with a background check and salary negotiations with Hursh.
During the executive board meeting, Hursh gave a brief introduction and a first report as executive director. Hursh first informed the room of his roughly 10 years of experience in emergency communications. Hursh was previously employed by the Washington State Patrol for 10 years before taking on the new role in Lewis County.
Hursh appears to already have connections to the local community. 911 executive board chair and Centralia Chief of Police Andy Caldwell recused himself from the decision to hire Hursh when the board first began considering him in September. At the time, Caldwell said that a member of Hursh’s family worked for the City of Centralia. Caldwell presumably recused himself to avoid any concerns over conflicts of interest given that he and a member of the candidate’s family work under the same local government.
As part of his first report as executive director, Hursh said his first step has been to improve and speed up the call center’s training process with help from Casteel. The center is currently understaffed and looking to onboard new employees quickly to get up to its desired number of staff members.
“We’re starting work on the training program,” Hursh said. “We've already started looking over that, working on upgrading the facilities a bit to accommodate a bigger number of trainees to come in. Some ways to speed up that process to get dispatchers on the floor faster.”
Caldwell added that the executive board will also be relying on Hursh to help develop bylaws for the governing of the countywide call center. The board has frequently discussed creating bylaws that would establish governing procedure, chain of command and more. The board, however, has repeatedly put creating bylaws off with hopes that a new executive director would take the lead and lean on experience in the field to improve procedure.
Executive board member and Lewis County Commissioner Scott Brummer commented on the need for an executive director's input back in August.
“Hopefully our new director will have insight and be familiar with and provide a lot of input for that, because the devil’s always in the details, right?” he said.
