My career in emergency services started in Bay County, Michigan, where I served as both the Bay County 911 Director and the Bay County Emergency Manager. It continued in Saginaw County, where I became Executive Director of Saginaw County 911. Now I'm at Prepared, working on emergency services technology nationally. Along the way, I've learned some things about public service, technology, and the Great Lakes Bay Region that I want to put down in one place.
Bay County is where I'm from and where I learned the fundamentals of emergency services. As 911 Director, I was responsible for the dispatch operations that connect people in crisis with the help they need. As Emergency Manager, the scope widened to disaster preparedness, planning, and coordinating multi-agency response across the county.
These are two different jobs that share a common core: you're the person who has to make systems work when it matters most. A 911 center doesn't get to have a bad day. Emergency management doesn't get to be caught off guard. The tolerance for failure is essentially zero, which shapes how you think about everything — staffing, training, technology, communication.
Bay County taught me that emergency services is fundamentally about people. The technology matters, the budgets matter, the policies matter. But at the end of the day, a dispatch center is only as good as the people answering the phones. I carried that lesson with me to everything that followed.
Moving to Saginaw County 911 as Executive Director was a step into a larger operation. Saginaw County serves more than 190,000 residents, and the center handles a higher volume and wider variety of calls than Bay County. The staffing challenges were proportionally larger too.
It was at Saginaw County that I made the decision to deploy artificial intelligence in the dispatch center — one of the first implementations of its kind in Michigan. The system used natural language processing to handle non-emergency calls, freeing up dispatchers to focus on genuine emergencies. WNEM TV5 covered the deployment, and the story received attention from other agencies around the state wondering whether they should consider something similar.
I've written extensively about the lessons from that deployment. On LinkedIn, I explored the broader implications in articles like "Intelligence Is Getting Cheap. Insight Isn't" and "Stop Chasing AI Headlines. Build a Small, Boring Practice." The core insight from both pieces — and from the deployment itself — is that technology adoption in high-stakes environments requires more human work, not less.
Both Bay County and Saginaw County are part of what's called the Great Lakes Bay Region — a cluster of communities along the Saginaw River and Saginaw Bay that share economic, cultural, and geographic ties. Understanding the region matters for understanding emergency services here, because the challenges aren't confined to county lines.
A severe weather event doesn't stop at the Bay-Saginaw county border. A hazardous materials incident on the Saginaw River affects communities downstream. A staffing shortage at one 911 center puts pressure on neighboring centers. Regional cooperation isn't optional — it's the only way these systems work.
This regional perspective also shapes my involvement with Save Our Shoreline, where I serve on the board. The organization's work protecting Saginaw Bay's shoreline is connected to the same community resilience that emergency services aims to build. I wrote more about that connection in a separate post about Save Our Shoreline.
Today I work at Prepared, helping build technology tools for 911 centers across the country. The work draws directly on what I learned in Bay County and Saginaw County — not just the technical knowledge, but the understanding of how dispatch centers actually operate, what dispatchers actually need, and how technology adoption actually works in public safety environments.
I also continue writing about AI and technology on LinkedIn and Medium, maintaining my garden blog at Freighter View Farms, and serving on the Save Our Shoreline board. These threads might seem disconnected, but they share a common element: the belief that something important has changed in how technology and communities interact, and that people with operational experience have something valuable to contribute to that conversation.
Bay City is still home. The Great Lakes Bay Region is still where my roots are. And the work — whether it's emergency services, conservation, or writing — is still fundamentally about serving the communities I come from.