What kind of building will $6.9 million buy?

Flathead County voters are being asked to approve up to $6.9 million in bonds to build a new emergency dispatch center south of Glacier High School.

Here is how the long, narrow north-to-south building has been designed.

The main dispatch room would seat six dispatchers at individual stations with room to add two more in the future.

Four small offices are just south of the main dispatch room - designed to be wired so the walls can be removed so that area can hold another four dispatch stations sometime during the next 25 years.

The public would be locked out of the dispatch area.

The building's south end would hold the emergency operations center with view screens and phone banks to enable it to become the county's headquarters during disasters ranging from the expected (forest fires) to the far-fetched (Hungry Horse Dam collapsing).

This area also would include the public entrance to the building as well as a publicly accessible multipurpose room.

Currently the county emergency operations center is one big room with no phones in the basement of the Flathead County Justice Center - the same room that would become the new consolidated dispatch center if the bond referendum fails.

At least nine office-sized rooms are along the proposed building's eastern side.

Most would be permanent offices for emergency staff people moved from elsewhere to the new building.

These would include the center's director, a budget person, an emergency operations planner, a fire service area coordinator, a communications engineer, an information technology manager, and a person mapping the county's homes and roads for global-positioning-system purposes.

A space will be set aside for law officers to write reports. There also will be a "quiet room" so a dispatcher can decompress for a few minutes after an especially intense or harrowing incident.

One empty office would hold a stationary bicycle or possibly some weights until that space is needed for administrative purposes.

There would be lockers and showers and a place for a refrigerator and microwave oven - all which would be especially needed during major emergencies when numerous people work 24-hour days, said Mark Peck, the county's 911 project coordinator.

Space also would be set aside for the behind-the-scenes electronic equipment as well as backup machinery.

The building's northern end would hold warehouselike rooms and some garagelike bays.

That's because the county has a massive amount of emergency equipment and material - some dating to the early Cold War days - scattered in other buildings, mostly at the county's road department complex on Willow Glen Drive.

The plan is to consolidate all that material at the emergency operations center.

Also at the roads department, the county has its backup generators, command-and-control van, a hazardous materials scrubbing trailer, a medical response trailer and a couple of other trailers parked outside. Peck wants to consolidate them indoors in the garage portion of the proposed building.