By Jessica Bartlett, Town Correspondent
Hingham, Hull, Cohasset, and Norwell will join together in August to create the first regionalized dispatch center in Massachusetts, an accomplishment that the four communities have been working to finalize since 2008.
Hingham will move into the new center, which will be located on the second floor in the right wing of Hingham’s Town Hall, on Aug. 23. Soon thereafter, Norwell, Cohasset, and Hull will move in at one-week intervals starting Sept. 13.
The move is the final step in a project that town officials hoped to have finished a year ago.
“It’s been a long arduous process, but in the end, we’re going to provide a much more enhanced public safety dispatch service,” said Hingham Town Administrator, Ted Alexiades. “It will be a better coordination of resources across the region, and ultimately, the towns will save money. It’s a better service at a lower cost.”
The towns started discussions about combining forces in the winter of 2008, a concept that would become more tangible after the towns formalized an agreement in 2009.
With help from the state’s 911-dispatch center, which has given almost $5 million to the project thus far, the South Shore communities would work to bring the center from theory into reality.
But coordinating all four towns into the same computer system, acquiring the same radios for all stations, establishing identical protocols, and creating similar dispatch codes would slow down the process.
In addition, constructing the design of the facility, determining what software to use, and coordinating move dates has also eaten up weeks in the project’s timeline.
Although it’s a year after the expected due date, officials remain excited about the project.
"We’re in the home stretch," said Hull Town Manager Philip Lemnios. "This has been a multi-year process, it has a lot of complexity to it, technical issues that needed to be resolves, and personell issues of getting everybody in the same room, but everyone's been talking to each other and arriving at a common objective."
“It’s a more cohesive, enhanced service,” Alexiades said. "Doesn’t matter where you are in the region, this dispatch center will be able to allocate resources to you."
According to Alexiades, the effort to bring this innovative project into being has spurred interest in other communities, who may come on board with the project once the department is established.
There is room within the center to double, he said. The potential means four, similarly sized towns came come on board, or a larger town such as Weymouth could join in.
As for establishing a similar center elsewhere, Alexiades warned that the process is not easy.
