AUSTINTOWN — Mahoning County will cover this year’s costs for many communities that use the Austintown dispatching center while new contracts are negotiated.

The township also hopes the transition to a statewide radio system will save money in the long run.

But communications remains expensive for a township with a strained budget.

Last week’s trustees meeting highlighted many of the costs Austintown is trying to manage, as one of the primary hubs for emergency service communications in Mahoning County and a charter member of the Council of Governments that manages many of those operations and costs.

Trustees approved $300,000 in advances from the general fund to the communications fund — $100,000 March 18 and an additional $200,000 March 25. Those advances will be offset by a check for more than $335,200 from Mahoning County commissioners to cover the costs of dispatch services for nine communities whose contracts for dispatch services through Austintown are being renegotiated.

That is in addition to the $1.1 million the county will pay to Austintown (and $600,000 to Boardman) for operation of their dispatch centers, per the Austintown-Boardman-Mahoning County Council of Governments (COG) budget, which trustees also approved April 7.

In January, Austintown officials announced that the township would immediately reopen contracts to renegotiate more equitable rates with 21 of the other 23 communities its dispatch center serves. Springfield and Beaver townships are locked in for the year, but their contracts will be revisited in 2026. Documents show that in 2024, Austintown Police Department paid $831,941 for dispatch services and accounted for 21,714 of the 86,703 total calls the center handled. That comes to $38.31 per call. Austintown Fire contributed $207,985 and accounted for 5,164 calls for a rate of $40.28 per call.

Ellsworth Fire Department, Poland’s Western Reserve Joint Fire District, and the Beloit, Jackson, Milton, Lowellville, Coitsville, New Middletown and Craig Beach fire departments all paid between $2,400 and $35,000 and accounted for anywhere from 156 calls to 2,402 calls. The rates they paid per call were between $11.30 and $22.31, according to figures provided at the township meeting.

Austintown also dispatches for the Austintown-Boardman-Mahoning County Council of Governments, which serves the Milton Township, Craig Beach Village, Jackson Township Poland Township and Poland Village police departments, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office and Mahoning County Dog Warden.

Austintown will negotiate to get the per-call rate for everyone closer to the projected 2025 cost of $29.

That means substantial increases for the other communities. D’Apolito said the county’s one-time payment covers the difference between what they originally negotiated for 2025 and what their revised cost will be with the new rate. Those communities, this year, will only pay the small difference between the 2024 rate and the 2025 rate that was originally negotiated.

D’Apolito said the county’s support gives the township time to renegotiate the contracts with those communities for next year and gives them time to save for the increased rates they’ll pay going forward.

“We made it work with rates that were probably fair when they were first negotiated, but they were not regularly updated and now they’re out of place with our costs,” he said. “They were not a fair cost allocation of our resources, and we now have new mechanisms in our contracts that we’re proposing. We did one-year agreements that included a notice that rates would be increasing going forward.”

D’Apolito and the trustees hope the new rates will take some of the burden off the township’s general fund, even as they project between $850,000 and $1.1 million in transfers to the financially-strapped police department.

They also hope the transition to the statewide radio system known as MARCS will save more money for the township. In February, the COG voted unanimously to move to the Multi-Agency Radio Communication System at a total cost of $1.3 million.

Because the move will put the cost of emergency response radio infrastructure maintenance in the hands of the state, the costs passed onto local communities through per-radio monthly fees will be eliminated.

Right now communities, including Austintown, pay about $18.20 per radio per month. Once the transition to MARCS is complete, those communities will only pay $5 per radio per month.

D’Apolito and Austintown Dispatch Supervisor Steve Sinn said the cost savings for the police and fire departments’ roughly 160 radios will be about $2,100 per month, or $25,000 per year.

The network also covers the radios communities use for road departments, but D’Apolito said Austintown will not use the new network for its road department radios, and instead will save additional money.

“We removed our road radios from the MARCS transition, and they will be on a Verizon network with a much lower start-up cost,” he said. “The monthly payment is a bit higher, but the three-year commitment is less than $15,000 per year compared to about $70,000 to bring the radios over to MARCS, and the network is more designed for what road departments need.”

The Verizon plan will cost the township about $4,500 per year, he said.

“MARCS is requiring a brand new encryption for the radios and that’s increasing the cost,” D’Apolito added.

The only drawback to the Verizon plan was the cost of a new separate radio in the dispatching center to allow them to reach the road department.

However, the switch to MARCS is not without its upfront costs.

Many of the communities will have to pay to replace radios that are outdated and technologically incompatible with the new system.

For Austintown, the police department will have to pay $48,048 to replace three mobile (in vehicle) and five portable (handheld) radios, and the fire department will have to pay $128,594 for 10 portables and 14 mobiles.

The township also had to buy a new consolette for the dispatch center for the MARCS transition at a cost of $11,500.

Old infrastructure costs linger as well. Trustees approved another $68,500 transfer from the general fund to communications to cover the annual payment for a tower Motorola built to support Austintown police and fire radios when the COG was originally formed.

D’Apolito said the township has one or two more of those payments to make.