BANGOR – Navigating one of this year’s most controversial budget issues, city councilors reversed themselves and voted Monday night to retain the city’s dispatch program.

The councilors’ 5-3 vote at their regular meeting came five days after their decision to join the Penobscot Regional Communications Center, effective Jan. 1 of next year.

Councilors voting to maintain the city’s dispatch program were Annie Allen, John Cashwell, Peter D’Errico, Frank Farrington and Richard Greene. Voting in favor of going with the regional program were Geoffrey Gratwick, Gerry Palmer and Dan Tremble, the council’s chairman.

Bangor is among a few holdouts avoiding the county operation established in 1997. Also not participating are Lincoln, the University of Maine and state police.

Regional dispatch was designed to save taxpayers money by avoiding duplication of services and to help communities fulfill stringent state emergency dispatching requirements.

The regional program, however, has encountered resistance in Bangor, where opponents have cited concerns about the loss of local control and the quality and level of service county dispatch provides.

Last Wednesday night, during the last of 14 budget workshops this year, a majority of councilors agreed to join the county program, a move projected to save $150,000 in the first year and an estimated $250,000 a year beyond that. The decision was one of a series of cost-cutting measures councilors had planned to adopt as a way to soften the blow on property taxpayers.

The decision, however, proved unpopular with the public Monday night. Nearly a dozen people, including Police Chief Don Winslow, Fire Chief Jeff Cammack and members of their respective departments, spoke in opposition to joining the regional center.

Winslow and Cammack, who both opposed the move, said that despite more than 20 meetings with county officials, there still remained several “transitional issues” to overcome. While some progress has been made in ensuring the county could and would meet Bangor’s needs, problems that remain include:

. Computer software that did not meet the needs of those in the fire service.

. The county’s inability or unwillingness to monitor the closed-circuit cameras in the police station as a security measure.

. The county’s unwillingness to guarantee that it would dedicate specific dispatchers to the two dispatch consoles it would have dedicated to Bangor calls.

Another consideration, as Cammack saw it, was that if Bangor commits to the county program now, it will lose any leverage it has for negotiating the changes its public safety officials believe need to be made if Bangor ever is to join.

Perhaps the biggest concern cited by the two chiefs and many of the people who addressed the council was that Bangor risked losing the level of service it now enjoys with its own program and dispatchers, who are familiar with the city’s emergency protocol and with the city itself.

A factor in the council’s earlier decision to join the county program was the fact that the city now is paying for a service it does not use.

Initially, the regional center’s operating budget was funded by user fees from participating cities and towns and county funds.

Three years ago, the county budget committee voted to fund the entire service through the county tax, which translated into a $51,000 increase for Bangor, which, based on its assessed value, pays about 25 percent of the county budget.

Councilors are awaiting a judgment in Penobscot County Superior Court on whether the county has the right to make Bangor pay for dispatch services it has not used. That, some said, may help determine what the city ultimately decides.