VALPARAISO | During Tuesday night's Porter Town Council meeting, Porter Fire Chief Lewis Craig voiced his complaints about the county's E911 dispatch system and said he has spent a year attending meetings, making phone calls, and has received no response.

But Dave Sheibels, director of the Porter County E911 Department, said he has never heard of any issues from Craig and was surprised to learn of the story from the newspaper.

"I've not had any complaints from the Porter Fire Department, either verbal or written. I've not seen any complaint form. I was never called, heard nothing at any meetings, and so I'm not sure how to answer his frustrations. I'm a little frustrated that I haven't heard these complaints," Sheibels said Wednesday.

Craig said he has voiced his concerns at monthly meetings and has contacted Porter County commissioners, including John Evans who represents the north county.

Craig said Evans response to him was something he couldn't repeat publicly, but Evans said he has never been contacted by Craig.

"I first learned of the problems when I read the paper this morning and the chief has never contacted me in regard to this problem. In fact, I left his message today asking him to fax me a list of his complaints. He has never ever talked to me about it," Evans said.

During the council meeting, Craig cited problems with dispatcher static on his department's pagers, making it difficult to hear the call, dispatchers who turn down the volume too low to hear, and outages.

Sheibels said there is no volume control for dispatch and the fire repeater operates with a standard output wattage.

"We can't turn the volume down, it's not like a stereo. It's wattage output level. It's at 100 watts and been at 100 watts forever. I can't go into dispatch and touch the wattage output and wouldn't know how to do it even if I wanted to, so I don't know what volume he's talking about," he said.

In fact, Sheibels said their communication has improved in the past six months.

"On Dec 29, 2009, we consolidated Portage and I recognized that we we're going to bring in 50,000 more calls, so I got the funding to buy dispatchers headsets. As of that date and they've been wearing them and I think that has greatly improved service, so now room background noise is diminished because they have the microphone right in front of their mouth, and all of the agencies have told me that's been an improvement," he said.

Craig also cited an incident last week where dispatch gave him a wrong address which he questioned. He was told dispatch would get back to him and they never did, he said.

Sheibels responded upon reading of this incident in the newspaper, E911 Operations Manager Sue Baugher began investigating.

"She doesn't remember ever getting a call from Craig on this and she looked back to January 1 at the medical calls and can't find the call in question, but she is still investigating. She will be talking to Craig," Sheibels said.

Craig also cited repeater outages and alternate channel outages last week.

Sheibels responded, "I'm assuming he means during the storm on the 18th and we lost two remote receivers, one at Dunes State Park office and one at Highway 12 and Kimmel Road., which were disabled when phone system went down, but there was no outage. I stayed here until 8 p.m. that night and there weren't any problems anywhere. We had 200 911 calls about lines down and power outages, but there wasn't any downtime."

He said there is no opportunity for repeated complaints to go unheard.

"With complaints, we've set up a process 10 years ago or so. We have a standard complaint form and we have a chain of evidence where everybody does it the same way so it's standardized. And I've not seen any complaint he's referring to," Sheibels said.

Craig said during his complaints, Sheibels told him there was nothing he could do about the problems and to "live with it."

Sheibels responded, "I've never said that to anybody anywhere. Anybody who knows me knows my professionalism. If there's a problem we all work together."

"Craig says he's been fighting for over a year but I don't even know what the fight is," Sheibels said.