Portland, Oregon The overlapping lines of responsibility that lead to confusion and frustration among the agencies charged with policing Multnomah County's 100 miles of waterways soon could become much less tangled.
On Wednesday, the Portland City Council will consider adopting recommendations to study, discuss and clarify the roles of the Multnomah County sheriff's office, Portland fire and police bureaus, U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies when it comes to public safety on the water.
The next day, county commissioners will receive a briefing on the subject and could accept the same recommendations as early as their subsequent meeting Oct. 19.
"The main thing, to be frank, is that just having people take a look at the game plan to serve the public on the water is a good thing," said Lt. Michael Shults, the sheriff's office river unit commander. "Nobody wants to be confused when potentially lives are at stake."
City Commissioner Sam Adams, who will bring the matter before the council, said these measures are as far as the affected governments and agencies can go with the available information.
"There's still a lot that we don't know because the data simply don't exist," he said. "But even once we get that, there is more still to do."
Should the City Council and county Board of Commissioners support the measures proposed, a committee would be created to study and help implement a number of recommended changes as well as provide "an ongoing forum to solve coordination problems and jointly address river safety issues," according to a July report issued by a steering committee.
The recommendations in that report include developing a better radio system so different agencies can talk directly to one another, a central collection point for reports and data, bringing in independent contractors to perform peripheral functions not part of core public-safety services - towing a burned-out boat, for example - and taking periodic satisfaction surveys of recreational and commercial users of local rivers.
By state statute, law-enforcement functions on the Willamette, Columbia and Sandy rivers belong to the sheriff's office. The City Charter gives the fire bureau the lead role on search-and-rescue operations. Portland police take over in many cases when a possible crime hits land.
Larger issues - environmental impacts of a boat explosion, for example - fall to the Coast Guard, also required by federal law to respond to all search-and-rescue calls.
But in practice, it is rarely that easy. Sometimes everyone shows up and doesn't need to, the product of separate dispatch systems. Sometimes the wrong agency shows up either because a call came in wrongly describing the law-enforcement need or because the wrong agency was the only agency notified.
And though the agencies use the same type of radio system, each is on a different frequency, making it hard to communicate.
The consequences are wasted resources and the possibility of legal liability or botched criminal investigations.
"We have to unwind and better understand 80 years of these agencies overlapping and intersecting," Adams said. "That is not easy to do, but it's something we need to do."
The decision to look deeper at the web of responsibilities grew out of the joint city-county law-enforcement budgeting process, which was designed to better allocate the $430 million spent annually on those services and to reduce duplicating certain services.
"I believe we can get more services out of that $430 million if we look at the gaps and overlaps with those services," Adams said. "And this is just part of the effort to do that."
A group studying the issue filed two reports, one in March and the other in July. Participants said citizen involvement in the process almost fully eliminated the prospect of interagency bickering.
"It cut down on the turf battles, for sure," said Christine Kirk, Sheriff Bernie Giusto's chief of staff. "There was a certain realism they brought to the table that kept everyone focused on the right things."
And Adams said input from all sides helped shape the recommendations further, citing the Coast Guard, the city of Gresham, Multnomah County officials and Portland's police, fire and emergency-communications bureaus.
"Hopefully this goes as well as we think it will," he said. "There's obviously a lot riding on getting this right."