A several years-long dream for the Washington County 911 dispatch staff and other public safety agencies is now a reality as the new Washington County Communications Center is up and running.

The dispatch staff officially moved into the new building on Wednesday, January 13th, after months of installing the new 911 radio system into the building that was completed last fall, which adjoins the sheriff’s office on Lexington Boulevard. The building’s design and construction was overseen by Neumann Monson and Carl A. Nelson, which broke ground in July of 2019. 911 Supervisor Cara Sorrells says she at one point didn’t expect the new building to happen in her career, “This is awesome, this is not overkill, this is what we need. It’s a good solid building, the technology is where we needed, we jumped from down here, to way up, it’s like caveman to ‘Star Wars’ because we were so far behind.”

The county is also now implementing its new RACOM radio communication system, with double the number of transmitter towers in the county and a nearly 100% in-house handheld radio reception, which they tested at around 100 different locations this past December. Sheriff Jared Schneider says the transition of buildings and technology has gone smoother than he anticipated, “And I really thought with us going live in the dispatch center and us coming on to the system last week that we would still be busy through the end of the month trying to make sure everything’s up and running the way that it should be. You figure there’s going to be some issues that you need to address, but it really went a lot better than I think any of us expected.”

Schneider says so far all the county’s law enforcement has been brought onto the new radio system, with fire and rescue services expected to log on by the end of February. For photos of the new communications center, visit the KCII Facebook page.