PICKENS COUNTY — Pickens County Council has approved a plan to create a state of the art unified emergency dispatch facility. Leaders are hoping to build the facility behind the Pickens County administration building on McDaniel Ave.
“As a first responder myself, I’m very excited about this potential and about moving forward. It’s been a long time in the works. It’s taken years of collaboration and working with different community leaders to get to where we are today. I am really excited and encouraged by this new project,” said councilman Chris Bowers.
Emergency services director Billy Gibson said the facility will serve as a centralized space for all emergency personnel to communicate when time is of the essence.
“Right now we have several different answering points for our 911 system throughout the county. What our goal is to eventually bring all those together in one point where when somebody calls, all of our different services, fire, EMS, sheriff’s office, our municipal police departments are all together in one room where that communication flow is much more quickly and much more efficient, “ said Gibson.
Officials said they are also upgrading their radio system.
“Most of our law enforcement partners on UHF, our fire and our ems are on VHF so if we’re in the field and a firefighter needs a deputy respond, they have to call a dispatcher and the dispatcher has to notify the deputy on their UHF radio so there’s a little bit of a delay,” said Gibson.
A new radio system will allow all first responders to communicate on one platform.
“We’ll be able to talk person to person and that will get that exchange of information out there much more quickly and therefore we can get the help out there that we need,” said Gibson.
According to Bowers, $8 million of ARPA funding was used towards this project.
“We used about $10 million of ARPA funding for our new radio system with the working conjunction with this and then we’ll be able to use some fund balance for that remainder of eight million that we’ll need, so there’ll be no tax increase to support this building,” said Bowers.
County council has sent out a construction bid to architects which will determine the costs and size of the communication center. They hope to get results back within the next 60 to 90 days.