PARIS – If you build it, they will call.

More and more people are dialing 911 than ever before in Oxford County. The number of calls for police, fire or rescue services has increased by 48 percent in the past three years, from 14,678 to 21,787 calls annually.

More calls require more manpower.

There needs to be three dispatchers on duty from 6 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday, and from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday, the county’s director of communications, Dan Schorr, said Thursday.

Two people work those hours now.

If one of them gets tied up on a call, particularly a domestic or medical crisis, the other has to take all incoming 911 calls in the county.

“The situation results in a degradation of services and increase the potential for liability,” Schorr said.

The county’s Regional Communications Center in Paris was designed with three dispatching stations four years ago.

The time has come to use them, he said.

“More people are used to 911 now. They use it quite a bit, and people are demanding more services.”

That’s especially true with ambulance calls, said Schorr. Whereas in years past, people with non-life-threatening medical emergencies would drive themselves or have a family member drive them to the hospital for treatment, now they’re dialing 911 for an ambulance, he said.

“Obviously times have changed, particularly with the EMS folks.”

Ambulance calls county-wide have increased by 66 percent in the past three years, from just over 3,000 to 5,337, Schorr said.

Schorr is asking for $23,000 more in this year’s budget to increase the hours of four dispatchers to 12-hour positions, alternating between three and four days a week. “That’s the easiest solution to the problem right now,” he said, because benefit costs would remain basically the same.

That cost would double if another full-time dispatcher were hired instead. The allocation of 11 dispatcher positions was approved in January 1999.

The RCC took over responsibility for dispatching calls from individual towns in 2001, when it became a Public Safety Answering Point for the statewide changeover to an Enhanced 911 system. Only the city of Rumford still handles dispatching on its own.

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