A contingent of city leaders, including the interim police and fire chiefs, are traveling to Pennsylvania today to tour a regional 911 dispatch center similar to the proposed Essex County facility that Gloucester may join.

Organized by state Sen. Bruce Tarr, a supporter of the regional dispatch plan, the trip is designed to familiarize the chiefs with regionalized emergency dispatch so they can recommend whether Gloucester should pursue it and how it would impact local 911 response.

Both Police Chief Michael Lane and Fire Chief Phil Dench are relatively recent appointees to their posts and are officially serving in interim capacity until the issue of civil service protections are resolved.

Both have said they need to know more about the regional 911 center before officially endorsing or rejecting the Essex County plan.

Along with the chiefs and Tarr and his staff, the Gloucester contingent will include city Chief Administrative Officer Jim Duggan.

"We are attempting to give local public safety officials the chance to understand how it works before they give an opinion on it," Tarr said Friday.

The regional dispatch plan calls for a new $5 million facility to be built on the site of the Essex County House of Corrections in Middleton. Much of the start-up costs are expected to be defrayed by a state grant.

The center will be run by the Essex County Sheriff's office and operating costs will be paid for by each community that joins it, now pegged at around $16.26 per resident. In Gloucester that would come out to around $490,000 a year based on recent population estimates.

The call center is designed to save its member communities money by pooling their resources and freeing them from employing dedicated dispatchers or extra police officers to take emergency calls.

Thirteen North Shore communities — including Manchester and Essex, but neither Gloucester nor Rockport — are in the initial group exploring the plan.

But officials involved in planning the facility have said Gloucester would be welcomed in to the project if it wants to be, and Mayor Carolyn Kirk and City Council President Bruce Tobey have expressed interest in exploring that prospect.

In 2007, Thomas Dubas, the director of the Lackawanna County, Pa., dispatch center was hired as a planning consultant for the Essex County project.

The Lackawanna facility is the one being toured by Gloucester officials this week.

So far, Dench has expressed tentative interest in the regional dispatch plan while Lane has expressed some reluctance that the time may not be right.

The City Council is receiving a briefing on and will likely discuss the regional dispatch proposal at it meeting July 14.

In 2007, Gloucester bowed out of the initial group of signatory communities because the estimated start-up costs at that time were deemed too high.

City Council will have to approve any plan for Gloucester to join the project.

Patrick Anderson can be reached at panderson@gloucestertimes.com