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A lot's changed since Gary Diegelman became an emergency dispatcher 33 years ago.

When Diegelman started there was one computer in the dispatch center. There was a manual typewriter for incident reports and a handwritten blotter book.

Today, a dispatcher sits in front a multi-line phone with six computer screens to track calls, incidents and the location and availability of first responders.

On his first day on the job, Diegelman was told, "here's a chair. Here's your training manuals. Sit down and shut up."

On his second day on the job, there was only one other dispatcher scheduled to work, Tom Graham (now town justice in Oakfield). Graham turned to Diegelman and said, "I hope you know what you're doing because you've got fire dispatch."

Today, a dispatcher is put through a minimum of four months of training before they're allowed to take calls and make dispatches on their own.

All of the changes that have taken place to make the Genesee County Emergency Dispatch Center what it is today is enough change for Diegelman, he said.

"Everybody says you know when it's time, and it's time," Diegelman said during his retirement party at the Sheriff's Office on Park Road. "I've been through so many changes I don't want to go through any more changes. With this new radio system coming and everything else, it's time."

Sheriff Gary Maha praised not only Diegelman's persistence in a very stressful job but the experience and dedication he brought to the department.

"I think he enjoyed the job," Maha said. "He learned a lot and we will miss his experience and his expertise. Like any job, you've got to be able to enjoy the job to be able to stick with it as long as he did."

During his 33 year career, Diegelman received four commendation awards, a certificate of appreciation, a meritorious award for continuous excellence, and a distinguished service award.

The job of a dispatcher alternates between times quiet and calm and then moments if not hours of overwhelming call volume.

Computers, Maha said, haven't necessarily made the job easier. There's more information to track.

It takes a person uniquely suited to the job to make it as a dispatcher, Diegelman said. You've got to be able to handle the lulls as well as the times of frantic work. You've also got to be able to deal with a public that can sometimes be surly and uncooperative.

"You need to be able to hear the public, what they want and be able to help them," Diegelman said. "You get people won don't really know what they want and you need to stir them and help them get to the right spot and then you get people who are belligerent and don't treat you well on the phone and you've got to control your emotions."

And then, he said, "there are a number of people who don't often call an emergency dispatcher and when they do, they want something and they need something and you're the first one they talk to."

The job is all about serving the public, Diegelman said.

One call Diegelman remembers the most is the night a woman called and thought there was an intruder breaking into her house. It's not an unusual kind of call and often such calls prove to be unfounded, but this time, somebody had broken into this woman's house and while Diegelman was still on the phone with her. Somehow during the attack, the intruder realized the woman was on the phone with a 9-1-1 operator and fled.

The intruder was never caught, but the woman suffered no serious injuries and thanked Diegelman later for being there for her.

"You've got to be that person who can take the call and not let it get to you because the next day you've got to go on," Diegelman said.

After 33 years of service, Gary Diegelman will no longer be taking those calls.

LISTEN: Gary DIegelman's final transmission as a dispatcher.

A car carrier semi-truck is disabled and blocking traffic at Oak and Richmond.

Batavia PD responding.

The victim of an assault on State Street yesterday afternoon was released from the hospital this morning and his alleged assailant was jailed last night without bail.

Woodrow Clarence Horseman, 37, address unknown, was charged with assault, 2nd.

The name and age of his alleged victim have not been released.

Det. Kevin Czora said Horseman and the alleged victim are acquaintances, and while there may have been a verbal exchange prior to the victim being hit, witnesses said they saw nothing they believed would have provoked an assault.

The alleged assault occurred on State Street at about 3:15.

The alleged victim was reportedly unconscious when transported by Mercy EMS to the Mercy Flight hangar for air transport to Strong.

Well, the morning started out nice. Then the sun disappeared. Here's a picture from Cook Road, Bethany, from my short drive this morning.

The Batavia girls swimming team put together a 94-63 win over Wilson at the GCC pool Thursday and the girls were clearly excited about the victory after the meet.

As the second smallest Class B team in the Monroe League, team wins are hard to come by for Batavia, but the program continues to develop promising young swimmers said Co-head Coach Sarah Geitner.

"We have a lot of very young swimmers, but everybody has fantastic attitude and wants to learn," Geitner said.

Because the school doesn't have its own pool, it can't field a modified team so it's a little tougher to build a varsity program, Geitner said.

"At the start of the season, we weren't sure if there would even be enough girls for a team and now that we're up to 14 girls, we're really excited," Geitner said.

Two girls joined the team this week.

At the top of the young roster are freshman Natalie Amico, junior Emily DiBacco, seventh-grader Elle Fulton and sophomore Brooke Leddon, the team's lone diver.

For the 14 girls on the team, team spirit was in strong supply at Thursday's match. Not only did the swimmers cheer their teammates, they cheered the Wilson swimmers as well.

Geitner said she would like to get more of the girls involved in the YMCA swimming programs to take an interest in joining the Batavia High School team.

"In order to grow a better program, we want to encourage more Y swimmers to come in and take the test," Geitner said.

To purchase prints of photos, click here.

Patricia Ann Herzog, 46, of Ross Street, Batavia, is charged with petit larceny.  Herzog is accused of stealing $465.11 in merchandise from Walmart.

Nicholas Joseph Mungillo, 19, of Union Square, Batavia, is charged with petit larceny. Mungillo is accused of stealing $137.93 in merchandise from Bed, Bath & Beyond.

David M. Kohmescher, 32, of McCall Road, Rochester, was arrested on a warrant related to an aggravated unlicensed operation charge. Kohmescher was stopped by Rochester PD for an alleged traffic violation and found to be a warrant suspect from the Town of Le Roy.  He was turned over ot the Sheriff's Office, arraigned in Town of Le Roy Court, and released.

After covering Batavia High School girls swimming at Genesee Community College (post on that tomorrow), I decided to go for a drive through our beautiful county and make a few pictures.  Here are three shots from the drive.

First stop, above, Warboys Road, Byron.

Along North Byron Road.

Darkness on the edge of town ... Judge Road, Oakfield.

Volunteer firefighters from Pavilion, Bethany, Le Roy and Stafford are responding to a barn fire on Cowen Road in York.

Bergen has been asked to fill in at Le Roy's hall. South Byron to stand by in its own hall for Stafford.

Out on Route 5 this morning, kind of in the Bushville area, crews were harvesting potatoes.

After Jerry Greenfield's talk at Genesee Community College yesterday, I stopped to take a picture of the GCC clock framed by autumn color. Greenfield is co-founder of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc.

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It is possible, Jerry Greenfield told the assembled audience in GCC's Stuart Steiner Theater this afternoon, to run a business that is both socially conscious and profitable.

Ben & Jerry's did it, and it's a culture that remains in place even 12 years after Greenfield and his partner Ben Cohen sold Ben & Jerry's to Unilever for $326 million.

From early on in the company's history, Greenfield said, he and Cohen shared a vision that the company would buy raw materials locally, invest in the communities where Ben & Jerry's  operated and donate to charitable causes.

They also did things like find suppliers such as a bakery in New York that employs disadvantaged workers (the bakery makes brownies for Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream).

"The way we approached it was to think how can we find ways to bring social and environmental concerns right into the day-to-day business activities so it's not central to what we do but just a part of what we do," Greenfield said

Greenfield's appearance was part of Wolcott J. Humphrey III Symposium on Leadership and Community Life.

Several times during his talk, Greenfield referenced "community" --  like where Ben & Jerry's buys product or where Ben & Jerry's donates money or how it supports its employees. He encouraged the audience to support local businesses and businesses that share the customer's values.

"I think everything is essentially local," Greenfield said after his talk. "For Ben & Jerry's, the farmers that we buy milk and cream from are neighbors. We want to support our neighbors."

Students at the New York State School for the Blind in Batavia were paid a special visit today by members of the State Police out of the Batavia Barracks, Troop A.

The troopers hosted an ice cream social (ice cream donated by Perry's) and interacted with the students, letting them touch their holsters, pet the K-9, sit in a patrol vehicle and blast the siren themselves.

This past winter Troop A hosted a fundraiser and donated the proceeds to the School for the Blind. They dropped off the donation around Christmas and had so much fun, they decided they wanted to find a reason to come back

"We received a donation and so we thought we would come out and give it to them," Sgt. David Martek said. "It's just something for the kids. We had a good time with them last year and we just thought we'd come back and do something fun for them."

Other uniformed personnel participating today were Trooper Nicole Berostko, Trooper James Jackson, Trooper Michael Swarthout and Sgt. Mike Dembrow.

Martek said, however, it was really the Batavia Barrack's civil staff who put the event together, arranged the donations and were on hand to serve the ice cream.

A $10.8 million upgrade to the county's emergency radio system is expected to greatly improve the reliability and efficiency of emergency communication, but the unintended consequence is that citizens, off-duty first responders and the media could all be in the dark for months or longer once the new system is fully operational.

It's a bit of a surprise to everybody involved, but the new technology being installed by Rochester-based Harris RF is incompatible with even the most advanced consumer scanners currently on the market.

And when new scanners are released -- perhaps as early as the first part of the year -- they are likely to cost as much as $500 to $600 each.

Sheriff Gary Maha is a big believer in the idea that citizens with scanners help solve crimes.  Clearly, when he spoke with The Batavian in the spring about the new radio system, he didn't anticipate the new technology would be incompatible with existing digital/trunking scanners.

"We're few and far between out there," Maha said. "We need all the eyes we can possibly have. If we have a bank robbery, we put that information out over the air so some citizen down the road may see the vehicle we want and can call 9-1-1. It's a benefit to us to have the people out there watching. They're our eyes and ears out there."

In recent weeks, we've had discussions with Maha about the situation and he said he's interested in finding a solution.

Getting scanners into the hands of media outlets is one thing. One solution that's been used in other parts of the country is for local law enforcement to lease emergency radios, with the outgoing transmission capability disabled, to news outlets. These radios cost in the neighborhood of $4,000 each, so it's still an expensive solution.

Another solution is putting streaming feeds of emergency transmissions from the P25 system on the county's Web site. But it's unclear at this point if the county has the available bandwidth or necessary technology to make this happen.

A Web-based solution would help both media outlets and make transmissions available to all county residents who care to tune in.

The Sheriff along with Undersheriff William Sheron met yesterday with executives at Harris.

Sheron said that Harris indicated it's a problem beyond the scope of their work, but said they are aware of other jurisdictions doing exactly what the Sheriff is considering.

"We're certainly aware of the issue and are interested in finding a solution," Sheron said.

Genesee County isn't the only jurisdiction facing this issue, as more and more agencies switch to the new technology and RadioReference.com's forums are filled with discussions about the situation.

What The Batavian has been able to piece together from the forum posts as well as interviewing Gerry Oliver, owner of G&G Communications in Le Roy, is that:

• A company called GRE America made a radio that was designed to be compatible with Phase II technology, but the company went out of business. Its radio was imperfect technology and needed improvements and wouldn't necessarily work with Harris RF communication systems. BRS Phase II TDMA radios can be found on Ebay, but you take your chances buying one.
• A company, The Whistler Group, Inc., has acquired GRE's intellectual property and is planning to enter into the scanner business. It didn't specifically announce a Phase II scanner, but presumably they'll bring one to market, perhaps before the end of March.
• Representatives from Uniden have dropped hints in Radio Reference that the company -- which is the largest manufacturer of scanners -- is close to announcing a Phase II scanner. Estimates of when it will go to market range from fiscal Q1 2014 through the end of 2014.
• Oliver believes that even after the switch-over, fire dispatch will remain on channel 4612, which means scanners currently programmed to pick up that channel will still be able to hear the fire dispatcher. There just won't be any chatter from emergency responders in the field answering the calls for people still listening on old scanners.

Radio Reference is an organization of ham radio operators and scanner enthusiasts. Through RF, volunteers from around the nation make their local emergency communications available on the radioreference.com Web site. Every smartphone app that allows people to listen to police and fire calls on their iPhones and Droids uses RR feeds, so if RR doesn't have working Phase II scanners, then those apps won't work for P25 jurisdictions.

Harris officials would not comment for this story.

The county has until March 1 to stop using one of its current 800 mhz channel so that the bandwidth becomes available for an inter-operable communication channel for federal Homeland Security.

Steven Sharpe, director of emergency communication, said installation begins next month, but current scanners will work on existing emergency channels until the P25 infrastructure is in place and operational.

Migration to the new system for emergency users should begin in December.

Beyond that the schedule of the transition depends on other factors -- from FCC licensing to tower crew availability -- though all equipment is scheduled to be installed by Feb. 1, giving the county one month to meet the 800 mhz channel deadline.

What happens at that point largely depends on what the county can make available to citizens and media for monitoring emergency transmissions, and what Whistler and Uniden make commercially available for purchase.

Oliver said there are a lot of people concerned about the issue, and people should be concerned.

"This is a public safety issue and it's a public information issue," Oliver said. "There's the average listener who pays taxes and thinks they have a right to listen in, but there's also the issue of firemen, off-duty police officers and EMTs -- how are they going to listen?

"I hope there's a solution for safety sake," he added. "Let's say I'm an (off duty) EMT and I live down the street from a call, a scanner might tell me, do I respond? What should I do if I hear nobody's responding? Those are the people who need scanners."

For the first time since April 2008, Genesee County's unemployment rate dipped below 6 percent, being recorded at 5.8 percent for August.

That's three-tenths lower than July and a percentage point lower than August 2012.

Wyoming County's unemployment rate dropped to 6.6 percent, Orleans to 8.4 percent and Livingston to 6.7 percent.

In WNY, only Ontario County at 5.7 percent has a lower unemployment rate than Genesee County.

Buffalo's rate is 7.3 and Rochester is 6.9.

The state's rate is 7.5 and the U.S. rate is 7.3.

Press release:

Congressman Chris Collins (NY-27) has introduced the Government Shutdown Fairness Act (H.R. 3160). This legislation would stop members of Congress from receiving a salary in the event of a government shutdown.

“As members of Congress, it is our job to keep the government running, and if the government shuts down, I don’t believe we should collect a salary during that time,” Congressman Collins said. “It is wrong that members of Congress should continue to get paid while programs for veterans, seniors and many others are adversely impacted.”

This type of legislation has proven effective in the past. Earlier this year, the House passed the No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013 (H.R. 325), which said members of Congress would not be paid unless they passed a budget. Following the passage of No Budget, No Pay, the Senate adopted a budget resolution for the first time in four years.

The Government Shutdown Fairness Act is consistent with the 27th Amendment in holding salaries in escrow until the end of this Congress.

“Salary and job performance should be tied together, and if members of Congress aren’t doing their job, that should be reflected in their salary. The American people deserve more from their Congress and it is time, as members of Congress, that we put ourselves at the back of the line and put our constituents first in a government shutdown,” said Congressman Collins.

Brett William Snyder, 50, of Batavia Stafford Townline Road, Stafford, is charged with two counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon (assault weapon and magazine). Following a check on Snyder's residence by the Probation Department, a probation officer contacted the Sheriff's Office for assistance in the investigation of an alleged illegal firearm at the residence. Snyder was allegedly found in possession of a assault-style weapon and a large capacity magazine. Snyder was arraigned, posted $250 bail and released.

Tyler Pasquale Schroeder, 21, of Lewiston Road, Batavia, was arrested on a warrant out of Rochester related to a criminal impersonation charge. Schroeder was turned over to RPD.

Stacey Dawn Mancuso, 43, of Seneca Street, Elma, is charged with DWI, driving with a BAC of .08 or greater, driving left of pavement markings and drinking alcohol in a motor vehicle. Mancuso was stopped at 11:32 p.m., Sept. 17, by Deputy Kevin McCarthy, after dispatchers received a report of a vehicle on Route 33 in Pembroke that was unable to maintain its lane.

A 16-year-old of East Avenue, Attica, is charged with trespass. The youth is accused of being at a residence on Broadway Road, Alexander, after being told by the homeowner he wasn't allow on the property.

Ashley Marie Kreutz, 25, of Lewis Place, Batavia, is charged with petit larceny. Kreutz is accused of shoplifting at Kmart.

Teresa Marie Stephenson, 24, of Moore Road, West Henrietta, is charged with petit larceny. Stephenson is accused of shoplifting at Kmart.

Taylor Laren Schutt, 20, of Seminole Parkway, Cheektowaga, is charged with trespass. Schutt is accused of being on the roof of the bus garage at Alexander Central School.

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A Batavia police officer is searching the area around Tops for two white males on bikes with backpacks who are suspected of shoplifting.

The suspects are believed to be in their 30s or 40s. One is on a pink bike, the other on a mountain bike. They headed east on Main Street.

The officer said the stolen items were recovered, they think, but "the camel backpack was full of something."