St. Joseph Communication Center to receive new upgrades
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (News-Press NOW) -- The St. Joseph Communication Center has received about a $1 million grant from the Missouri 9-1-1 service board to purchase new equipment.
The communication center serves both St. Joseph and Buchanan county law enforcement, MoWest law enforcement, the fire department and other surrounding emergency responders.
Chase Cotter, a St. Joseph Police Department captain, said the grant will go towards improvements of the communication center technologies.
“The Next Generation 9-1-1 Grant we received will go towards improvements in software and hardware in our redundancies and how we take in 911 calls, as well as in GIS or geographical information systems updates,” Cotter said. “So basically, like call location services, we'll get better locations of where someone is calling us from,” he said.
Cotter also said the grant will help the communication center upgrade its servers and its call-taking hardware.
“We are transitioning away from our old copper phone lines, which are no longer supported and have kind of deteriorated infrastructure,” Cotter said. “Going to voice over Internet protocol or VoIP phones, which are more reliable, can switch over and transfer calls easier, and it has redundancies in the form of broadband, internet and cell phone signals,” he said.
The new technology will help with more accurate call locations. Cotter said their accuracy will rise to about 95%.
“So if somebody were to call in, we could tell exactly down to the street address on the street number where they are at,” he said.
Overall, this grant will help better serve the community.
“Basically just to ensure we offer a reliable and accurate service to our citizens and get and have the ability to always ensure we take in phone calls from people that need them, and know the locations of people that are trying to call us that may not be able to see an address or say where they're at,” he said.
The entire upgrade to the communication center will go into effect in 2026.
