JAY – It’s been just about a year since the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department communication center took over handling Jay’s dispatching services for police and fire, and it has been deemed a success.

“It’s going very well,” Jay police dhief Larry White Sr. said. “They are providing the same services we had provided when we had dispatch here . . . The only difference I see is I don’t have them here 24 hours a day for citizen walk-ins.”

Jay police secretary Donna Ladd is on duty each weekday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. if people need to get legal papers such as an accident report.

The county’s communications center is miles away off Route 4 in Farmington in the same building as the sheriff’s office and next to the jail.

Dispatchers there handle the calls from Jay by getting the necessary information to police officers, firefighters and animal control officer.

They do the same for most of the towns in Franklin County, except for Carrabassett Valley, which has its own communications center, and Maine State Police, which also has its own emergency communications center outside the county.

“All calls are being handled the same as they were when Jay dispatched,” White said of the changeover. “Police respond just as fast as they did prior to us moving dispatch.”

It really has not caused any more stress or hardships during the police officers’ shifts, White said.

“I attribute some of that to the officers’ work ethic and the computer software program we switched to approximately three years ago and also the use of laptops in the cruisers,” he said.

Officers use the computers to do a report or license checks in the cruiser, which helps them a lot and allows them to do things they couldn’t do before when Jay dispatched and also helps when Franklin County dispatchers are extremely busy, he said.

“I think the other thing that makes it work so well is the willingness at the beginning of Sheriff (Dennis) Pike to allow us at first to try his regular (radio) frequency and then go back to our own,” White said.

There were a lot of dead spots that hindered radio calls but after returning to Jay’s priority frequency that was all worked out.

Jay has a repeater on the top of Jay Hill that helps with emergency communications.

It also worked out well for Franklin County by lessening the load of calls on one frequency, White said.

“The transition went very well, I think, due to the partnership effort between the sheriff’s department and us to ensure it was a smooth transition,” he said. “It also alleviated $200,000 that year from the police budget.”

Franklin County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Ray Meldrum agreed with White about the transition and the service.

“As far as I know things have gone quite smoothly,” Meldrum said.

Dispatchers definitely have more work, but it doesn’t seem to be overwhelming them at all, he said.

Meldrum told county commissioners during budget talks in late 2007 that they needed to add a dispatcher to cover a third dispatching station at peak times.

Call volumes are up because the county is handling all wireless 911 calls and taking on emergency dispatching for Jay this summer, Meldrum said at the time.

The person in the new dispatch position would also assist the dispatch supervisor with data entry, fill utility shifts and leave shifts of other full-time dispatchers during vacations, holidays, and sick absences as much as possible while working a non-standard work week, he had said.