Residential and commercial alarm companies call in more than 2,500 alarms to Auburn police and emergency services every year, said Assistant Auburn Police Chief Larry Miller.

Some alarms are cancelled before police arrive, local security handles others, but in 99 percent of the cases police have to get to the site to confirm the alarm is false.

All that wasted effort costs the City of Auburn and its police department about $500,000 every year, Miller said.

“Officers are responding 99 percent of the time to false alarms where they could be better used to proactively control neighborhoods or reduce the response times to valid calls for service for our residents,” Miller said. “Instead, they are having to verify alarms that are inherently false.”

Safety is a prime concern. The police response to holdup, robbery and panic alarms is typically a code response requiring a minimum of four officers, usually more, driving through the city at high speeds with flashing lights and wailing sirens, Miller said.

“Thankfully, it’s never happened here, but police have been killed in other jurisdictions responding to false robbery, holdup and panic alarms,” Miller said.

Determined to do something about the problem, police and city officials studied what other police agencies were doing. The City then wrote a new set of rules based on a model ordinance, which the International Association of Chiefs of Police has adopted and the alarm industry supports.

Miller said the cities of Lakewood, Olympia and Redmond, which have adopted the ordinance, have reduced their false alarm calls by 70 to 80 percent.

The Auburn City Council approved the ordinance in January, and the police department has used much of the time since then to find and hire a third party, Maryland-based Public Safety Corporation, to administer the program.

Here is what the new, 25-page ordinance does:

• Requires “enhanced call verification,” meaning all alarm users or alarm companies must make two calls before they call 911 – the first to the location of the alarm, the second a followup to a second line or a cell phone to try to get hold of somebody to determine whether the alarm is valid.

• In many cases requires “sequential verification,” meaning before the alarm companies can ask for an officer response, more than a single activation has to go off, like both a front-door alarm and a motion detector. Balloons left in a classroom overnight, for example, might set off a motion alarm when they begin to drift, but they would not set off the door alarm and so would not meet the standard needed to get someone out to the site.

• Requires alarm companies to install the new “CPO1” technology standards on all newly issued, newly installed alarm systems in the city. People that have existing systems would not have to have them retrofitted, but all new systems will have to comply with the standards, which are designed to reduce the number of false alarms.

“One thing this technology does is double check the system so it doesn’t mistakingly trip the alarm when somebody goes out the door during activation,” Miller said.

• Allows for the suspension of sites that report three or more false alarms in a year. This means police will not respond. Any alarm company, and there are 80 in the Puget Sound region, that requests police response to a suspended site without verification will be guilty of a violation.

“Obviously, if someone on scene is calling from a site saying it’s a real burglary, it won’t matter what the status is, we’re going. But if it’s just a call for an alarm at a suspended site, we’re not going,” Miller said.

Valley Com. the 911 police and fire dispatcher, will have a list called ‘Premise History,’ so that when an alarm company calls about a site, personnel will pull up the the address and check for a warning that the site has been suspended for alarms.

• Outsources administration of the alarm program to the Public Safety Corporation. Police Chief Jim Kelly will remain the ultimate arbitrator on any appeals, but PSC will manage the process. The company will notify the police department when three or more violations have occurred during a 12-month period. To be reinstated, the person responsible for the suspended site must compete an online training program and pay a fee.

While PSC begins billing Aug. 1, the City is allowing alarm owners one free warning through next January, one year from the adoption of the ordinance. After the new year, there will no first warnings.

• Assesses a fine of $100 for each false residential or commercial burglar alarm. For each false holdup, robbery or panic alarm it assesses a $200 fine, double because of the inherent risk in a code response.

“If people realize there’s going to be a financial impact, it’s going to get their attention,” Miller said. “We can’t have our officers running about the cit willy nilly chasing these things down,” Miller said.

• Requires a $24 residential and commercial annual registration fee but allows a $12 senior discount.

• Requires the alarm companies to train all of their operators to limit the number of mistakes.

Miller emphasized the police department is not taking this step to make money.

“It’s not a revenue-producing issue for us,” Miller said. “First of all, there’s no upfront fees the City pays out to the PSC. It takes a percentage of the revenue that comes with the registration and the fines to pay its fees. The remainder goes back to the City to help offset costs to respond to remaining alarms.”

“I think it’s very important that police be freed up to respond to other calls because they are not wasting their time responding to false alarms,” said Councilman Gene Cerino.