NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The embattled head of Metro's 911 Center met Tuesday with Mayor Freddie O'Connell in an attempt to keep his job.
Director Steve Martini, as we have reported, was put on administrative leave earlier this month after an outside review found several significant issues at the city's Emergency Communications Center and blamed the director in large part.
The mayor then asked Martini to resign, and Martini refused. Tuesday's meeting was part of the civil service disciplinary process. The mayor now has 10 days to decide whether to suspend, demote, or fire Martini.
And this all comes after NewsChannel 5 Investigates exposed a series of problems at Metro's DEC.
And now, we have uncovered even more.
Long wait times in emergencies
When you call 911, you want someone to answer and send help as quickly as possible.
But in Nashville, we found, there's a chance you may have wait.
NewsChannel 5 Investigates obtained monthly staffing reports from the city's 911 center as well as nearly three dozen photos taken in the last six months by concerned employees who wanted to document the difficult working conditions there along with how long it can take to answer a call to the emergency line.
Alisa Franklin spent 27 years at Metro's 911 center as a dispatcher, a trainer, and a supervisor.
"So you're familiar with these charts, these scheduling charts [that we'd obtained]? We asked her.
"Yes," she told us.
She reviewed them for us and offered a blunt reaction.
"The numbers are very alarming. They're very alarming," Franklin told us.
We first heard about the staffing shortages last fall when a current dispatcher joined Metro councilmembers to call for changes at the 911 center.
Hannah McGuire explained how she and everyone else she's working a shift with might be taking calls, when more calls come in.
"And we just have nobody else to answer the phones," McGuire said.
And Metro Councilwoman Joy Styles expressed her frustration, too.
"They [the 911 Center] are woefully inadequately staffed," she told us.
So, we then asked for the monthly staffing reports.
We didn't get them initially.
Insiders told us director Steve Martini did not want us to see or have the information.
So, our repeated requests for these public records were ignored for weeks until finally after Martini was recently relieved of his duties and we were able to get them.
Alarming staffing numbers
What you see in the spreadsheets are 11 months of staffing charts from 2025. The colors show how closely each shift came to staffing expectations. Where there is orange, there were more than enough employees. Green, exactly what they needed. Yellow, below expectations, but still acceptable. And red, essentially unacceptable, as they had far fewer employees working than set standards.
And many months in 2025 were just covered in red.
October was the worst. We ran the numbers and found 77% percent or more than 3/4 of the shifts were red or below acceptable levels.
"There's not enough people on the phones to answer these calls," Alisa Franklin told us.
She explained that when you see on these charts multiple shifts, including busy weekend nights when they should have had 29 employees working and there were only 17, of those 17, some were working the police radios, others the fire radios, leaving a much smaller number to actually answer the emergency and non-emergency lines.
And sometimes, we found, there were just two or three call takers handling the 911 calls.
"Is that enough people to be answering 911 calls on a busy Saturday night?" we asked Franklin.
"It's not. It's honestly not," she replied.
And photos, again taken by employees over the last several months and shared with NewsChannel 5 Investigates, illustrate multiple occasions when there were only a handful of employees working and callers to the emergency line had to wait.
Just three months ago, on October 4 of last year, a Saturday night, staffing levels were below what they should have been and a photo we obtained shows that there were just 3 people answering 911 calls and the wait time on the 911 line was more than 2 minutes.
"Two minutes is too long," Franklin offered.
We asked Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell about what we'd found.
"This doesn't concern you?" we wondered.
"It absolutely concerns me but it concerned me even more years ago," the mayor replied.
O'Connell insisted that things are getting better at the 911 center and, in the mayor's words, "continue to meet our standards."
"So you could probably find in any moment, in any department, in any organization, a time when you see something unacceptable on a board, in a snapshot, in aggregate, but we have seen improvements in response times," the mayor explained.
In fact, the mayor's office sent us data, telling us that in the last five years, 90% of calls have been answered in 15 seconds or less. And last year, 93.7% were, despite all of the red on the monthly staffing reports.
The mayor told us he had never seen these charts and Martini had never mentioned to him that there was a problem with staffing.
But Alisa Franklin and those who are still working at the 911 Center tell us that most calls are answered quickly, not because they have the staffing, but because those who are working are pressured to work faster and answer more calls, prompting Franklin to describe what that's like.
"Just the stress of call after call after call," she told us.
And that's why she said so many employees burn out and there's so much turnover.
"You want to do the best that you can to help everybody, but there's only so much you can do with the amount of people that you have working," Franklin said.
And sometimes, she said, they do all they can and it's still not enough.
Late Tuesday, we were able to get the staffing reports for December and so far, in January. Last month, was another tough month with nearly 70 percent of the shifts "in the red" while January seems to be off to a slightly better start with higher staffing levels earlier in the day, but still a lot of the evening and night shifts making do with not enough employees.
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