The City of Grande Prairie has approved a project that will allow for a new Integrated Emergency Dispatching Centre, which will operate out of the City on 99 building downtown.
Grande Prairie Mayor Jackie Clayton says the move will fill the need of both the Chief of the Grande Prairie Police Service and the Chief of the GPFD indicating their desire to improve efficiency for emergency calls.
“In an effort to have more efficient services, it was identified by the Chief of the Grande Prairie Police Service, as well as the Chief of Fire, that an integrated dispatch would be a really seamless approach,” she says.
The new facility would answer calls for 9-1-1, Mobile Outreach, Peace Officers, fire, and police, all in one centralized location; however, Clayton maintains the project was identified as a need regardless of the GPPS, RCMP transition.
“It’s an opportunity, not just because of the new police service, but really a streamlining of services, so with the Grande Prairie Police Service, it provided us with an opportunity to transition to a different format,” she says. “It will be a central location, and everybody will work out of one dispatch.”
Council has already budgeted $1.2 million to support the project, but a provincial grant to support local growth has also been applied for, and Clayton says her council is “optimistic” the project will receive at least some amount of provincial funding.
Despite council’s greenlighting the project, it could be a while before the new space is up and running. Clayton says any of the locations the city looked at would require significant upgrades.
“Any facility that we looked at using required significant upgrades, there’s significant data requirements and really through that integration of services, you can imagine the sophistication and the amount of IT that would be in a facility like that, so it will take some time to build it out,” she says.
According to the city’s communications department, council is expecting the new facility to be operational by early 2026.
