The new year will bring a new dispatch service for several departments in Portage County as FireCom enters its final days.

Ravenna Township officials have written letters to the remaining members of FireCom — Brady Lake, Deerfield, Edinburg, Palmyra and Paris — informing them that the dispatch center will close up to 120 days after Jan. 1.

Most, if not all, of the remaining clients are expected to get their dispatching services from Trumbull County, whose 911 dispatch center is offering its services for $15 a call.

That’s a savings for some departments, and a slight increase for others. Tim Paulus, chief of the Palmyra Fire Department, said FireCom clients are paying anywhere from $13 to $44 per call for dispatching service. Palmyra is paying $13.63 per call and Edinburg, which has fewer calls, pays an average of $20.87.

Previously an analysis of dispatching rates in the area found that Kent State University dispatch could offer service for $58 per call; Cencom — which serves the Atwater Fire Department — would charge $32 per call; and it would cost about $45 per call to start a new dispatch center.

“(Trumbull County is) our best alternative,” Paulus said.

Ravenna Township Fire Chief Steve Bosso said he expects his department to be the last to move over to Trumbull, because it is the largest, and the transition will be done in phases.

“We don’t want to overwhelm them,” he said.

FireCom was once an emergency dispatching powerhouse that sent emergency help to most of the townships and villages in Portage County. Already, most of its members have found alternatives in Kent, Mantua, Stark County and Stow.

Ravenna Township trustees have long expressed frustration at bearing the brunt of the cost of running the dispatch center. 

Ravenna Township pays $182,922 to support FireCom. The other nine communities paid a total of $74,027.

The township proposed a new rate structure which they said would distribute the cost of the service more evenly. However, after townships balked at proposed increases ranging from 150 percent to 500 percent, Ravenna Township backed away from the plan and pursued a county-wide dispatch system. When those plans never came to pass, trustees said they would shut the dispatch center down and find an alternative service.

In the interim, several departments dropped out. Hiram Village’s police deparment, as well as the fire department that serves both the village and township, will have all calls dispatched by the Mantua Police Department starting in January.

Brimfield transferred its dispatch service to KSU, which already dispatched calls for its police department. Atwater transferred to Cencom, a dispatching service out of Stark County and Randolph transferred its service to the city of Stow.

When FireCom is no more, the Portage County Sheriff’s Office will handle dispatching for countywide teams, such as the HazMat, dive and technical rescue teams.

Paulus said the Trumbull dispatchers will use the same scanner frequencies for Portage calls.

“The only difference will be the voice on the scanner,” he said.

Trumbull County manages to keep its prices low because of its large number of clients, Paulus said. Trumbull County also subsidizes 75 percent of the service for clients in Trumbull County with proceeds from 911 charges on land lines, meaning that Trumbull fire departments pay $3.75 per call.

Bosso noted that the center offers the best service for the money, although the downside is that the dispatchers are out of the county and don’t know the community as well as local dispatchers do.

“Until our county gets something like this, this was the best solution,” he said.

The unfortunate side effect is that four full-time dispatchers and three part-time dispatchers will be unemployed, Bosso noted. 

“We’re doing what we can for them as far as job placement, but right now with the economy, money is tight for everybody,” he said, adding that Trumbull is too far for some of them to travel. “These guys and girls know the county very well. They continue to do an outstanding job.”