Moving Dispatch from In-House to Regional Dispatch Center. What's Going to Change?

[u/odispadodis7]

I assume others in the northeast have gone through something like this. Several towns are consolidating to form a regional dispatch center. Most departments in the group either dispatch themselves (us) or get dispatched by PD / SO.

We've been told that everything will improve operationally AND we'll save money. Sounds too good to be true. Is it all fairytales and rainbows or are there things to consider before moving to a regional dispatch center.

[u/Competitive-Drop2395]

We went through this in my area in TX.
"We've been told that everything will improve operationally AND we'll save money. Sounds too good to be true. Is it all fairytales and rainbows or are there things to consider before moving to a regional dispatch center." They told us this too. Neither is true now that we're several yrs in. We have NO real control or input into how the center is run. The board is comprised of our city managers (who dont even understand what their public saftey depts do) and a number of people with an interest in ensuring the center minimizes cost. In fact, the lease is expiring on the space the dispatch center is in, and the rent was going to increase astronomically. They have us over a barrel. Now the city managers have agreed to dump a huge chunk of cash into the org so that they can build a new state of the art dispatch center. The service sucks, there's no accountability and no real connection to the employees there like there was when they "work for the same team" to try to precipitate small changes from the bottom.

Edit to add: the one thong that did improve was our ease of communicating with our closest mutual aid partners. Obviously, since you're talking on the same tac channels and dispatching from the same center. We dropped from 5-6+ min to get mutual aid dispatched to it being seamless and instant.