PA. STATE POLICE Move to consolidate dispatch centers begins

Local troopers may be dispatched through an office in Clarion County.
By HAROLD GWIN
VINDICATOR SHARON BUREAU
SHARON, Pa. -- Pennsylvania State Police will unveil the first Consolidated Dispatch Center in Harrisburg next week, but it will probably be two years before dispatching in Mercer and Lawrence counties is affected.
The state plans eventually to have the dispatching from all 81 of its stations across the state handled by just five regional CDCs.
The first, in Harrisburg, went online this month and is being opened for a press tour Wednesday.
Trooper Linette Quinn, state police spokeswoman, said the other four CDCs will be brought online over a period of years and it will probably be two years or more before one opens in northwestern Pennsylvania.
The state is saying Mercer and Lawrence state police stations will be dispatched out of a CDC to be located in the area of Clarion in Clarion County, but Quinn said no specific site for that CDC has been determined yet.
The other centers are to be in Westmoreland County in southwestern Pennsylvania, the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area in northeastern Pennsylvania and Montgomery County in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Reasons for move
Quinn said the consolidation of dispatching duties was taken as both a cost-saving measure and as a way to get more state troopers back on the road.
She said 170 troopers across the state must now spend part of their time at a dispatch desk in their local station filling in for regular civilian police communications officers who may be ill or on vacation.
Displaced dispatchers are given first opportunity to apply for jobs in the CDCs, Quinn said, noting there are 50 dispatchers covering the Harrisburg CDC. Some may stay on at their stations as "greeters" -- desk personnel who deal with the public -- and others may choose to transfer to another state agency or leave state employment, she said.
Most individual stations have one, two or three dispatchers working at a time and they are sometimes hard-pressed to handle dispatching duties along with incoming phone calls and walk-in traffic.
The larger CDCs have more people on duty at any given time to provide backup support for one another, she said.