Advocated for many years because consolidation of services made operational sense and the concept appealed to the frugal nature of some municipal managers, regional dispatch may finally be making a good connection in Penobscot County.

It’s about time, and it hasn’t been easy.

On a typical dead day, there are eight different 24-hour dispatching centers open within hailing distance of Bangor. Those centers have people on the payroll and electronics equipment that is increasingly powerful, sophisticated and expensive.

A five-month study of regional dispatch for the Penobscot County commissioners priced the total in hardware and personnel to support this large, overlapping communications network at $1.75 million. It also revealed something else that was predictable, but now is documented: lots of down time.

An analysis of the shifts at the various centers — Bangor police and fire, the sheriff’s department, Old Town, Hampden, Millinocket, Brewer and Old Town — found that on average, the small centers received an average of one call an hour. Bangor PD and the sheriff were on the high side, with 2.5 complaints an hour.

Opponents of regional dispatch will remind their communities that those are averages and that there are times in every town when all hell breaks loose. They also will point out that during long lulls, dispatchers can be kept busy with office work.

But if people are honest, and they need to be on an issue so important to public safety and to municipal taxpayers, the real reason for the historic resistance to combined dispatch is: turf. Department heads in the past have been very protective of their electronic nerve centers.

The commissioners deserve credit for taking this initiative in behalf of taxpayers. They quantified important aspects of the argument for a regional center that in the past had been based on common sense, intuition and observation.

Logic, equipment and manpower costs, efficiency, and the power of technology make a forceful case for communities in this area to move to a central, regional dispatching service.