GREENFIELD — The Police Department has completed renovations to its dispatch center, a roughly two-year-long project that Chief Todd Dodge said was done primarily in-house through the Central Maintenance Department and volunteer work.

Walking through the dispatch center, equipped with high-tech work stations, noise mitigation, state-of-the-art technology and a security door with bullet-resistant windows, Dodge said the roughly $140,000 project will significantly improve working conditions for the city’s dispatchers. With work spaces better spread out across the approximately 500-square-foot center and sound insulation technology installed, Dodge said this will enhance dispatch’s communication with different emergency departments.

“One of the biggest enhancements to this and why it needed to be done was, historically, dispatchers were sitting on each other’s lap, and the noise crossover was unbelievable. … You’ve got these speakers shooting at you right at each workstation, and you have speakers for the radio, you have speakers for the county radio, you have speakers for the fire alarms,” Dodge said. “There’s a lot of communication going on, and what happened was, when we would have a major event or a simultaneous event between fire and police, every time you’d hear them come over the radio, you couldn’t even hear them in the field and you could hear the other dispatcher talking on the phone because they were basically sitting on each other’s lap.”

When the city first put the renovation out to bid in the summer of 2023, Dodge said no contractors agreed to take on the project. After the city put out a separate request for proposals (RFP) offering $240,000, Dodge said two contractors responded, both offering to take on the job for roughly $490,000.

When the bidders requested more than double the bid price, Dodge said it lead the Police Department to pursue ways the project could be done in-house. The department recruited workers from the Central Maintenance Department and electrician Ed Reniewicz, and Dodge said he and other officers volunteered to help with renovation work.

“All our balloons were deflated because we actually thought we were moving forward on this build. We had to kind of sit back and wonder, ‘How the hell are we going to make this happen?’ What we do know is we have a lot of people in here that have skills beyond police,” Dodge said. “We went to work on it — Central Maintenance did probably the most hours of anybody, but we gutted it, we brought in our saws and hammers and we pulled studs out.”

Although Dodge said he is still working to determine the project’s total costs, he estimates the city spent roughly $140,000 on the renovations, saving approximately $100,000 from the original bid price.

Communications Center Supervisor Cynthia Hunter said with some dispatchers working 16-hour shifts, the design was centered toward comfort for long periods of time. After Dodge mentioned the department’s plan to add an additional dispatch workstation to the center in the future, Hunter said the ability to keep an extra dispatcher on staff would help the department manage influxes of calls during emergencies.

“Everything is geared toward someone having to be in that room a lot. We’re a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week center, and we’re very, very appreciative of the chief and of the city, and certainly of the mayor and City Council and everyone coming together to make that possible,” Hunter said. “The third workstation is so integral when we have microbursts and we have large snowstorms, or just big storms in general, or some sort of mass casualty event, that sort of thing, when we can bring in a third dispatcher to help at least relieve some of the business line calls.”

The Police Department is currently in the midst of renovating the 205 Main St. storefront it acquired in the summer for use as a downtown substation. Dodge said while the 150-square-foot location’s space restrictions and difficulties acquiring custom window glass have complicated the renovation, the project will be presented before the Planning Board in the coming weeks.

With plans to equip the future substation with an artificial intelligence (AI) phone system by which residents passing by the station can video call with dispatchers, Hunter said the new station will also work to improve the city’s dispatch capabilities and response times.

“We already have the technology in place for dispatch,” Hunter said. “They’re going to be able to put some technology down there so that if no officer is in that building, they can hit a button [and] talk on the phone to dispatch here, so we can communicate with them.”

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.