By Peter H. Milliken

milliken@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Mahoning County commissioners approved a $2 million, five-year 911 emergency call-handling agreement with AT&T that will make it easier to consolidate the county’s eight 911 answering points into fewer locations.

The digital electronic call-handling server will be at an AT&T location in Akron, and it should be in service by the end of this year, said Maggi McGee, county 911 director.

“It will be transparent to the public. Everything is going to be exactly the same. There will be no delay,” in emergency-call handling, McGee said.

“We had to upgrade. We thought, if we had to upgrade, we might as well go with the best system that we can,” she said. “We will not have to manage the equipment. We will not have to purchase the equipment.”

The new equipment, which meets emerging standards of new technology, is being paid for by 911 service fees charged to cellular telephone users and distributed by the state to each county, McGee said.

“We’re consolidating equipment. Instead of having eight individual servers, as we do now, there will be one big server, and it’ll feed out the information,” to each Mahoning County 911 answering point, explained James Dorman, retired Boardman fire chief and a member of the county’s emergency 911 board.

The agreement the commissioners approved Thursday is needed because the county’s current analog equipment is 20 years old, and replacement parts no longer can be purchased for it, McGee said.

With less equipment at each answering point, moving dispatchers and consolidating service into fewer answering points will be easier, McGee said.

“Columbiana County is very interested in regionalizing with Mahoning County,” for 911 emergency dispatching, McGee said. “We already have 90 percent of their database on our database,” she said. “We would basically absorb them into our answering points,” if current trends continue, she added.