Law enforcement and emergency response vehicles here may soon be outfitted with positioning systems that would allow dispatchers to track their exact locations.

Vicksburg Mayor Laurence Leyens, a member of the E-911 Dispatch Center management board, told other members Wednesday that buying automatic vehicle location units would be his &#8220big push” when the Board of Mayor and Aldermen begins budget planning in May.

The global positioning detectors were budgeted for city emergency vehicles four years ago, but not obtained after Police Chief Tommy Moffett said they were not needed.

Wednesday, E-911 Director Geoff Greetham told the seven-member commission he’d informally tested one system already based on previous discussions about buying the units, but would still have to put together a cost estimate and determine the number of units officials will need.

&#8220There’s a very good chance our board is going to approve AVL,” Leyens told Greetham. &#8220Sometime in May, I need a real number for all the police and all the fire trucks.”

An AVL system puts a black box with a global positioning satellite antenna in a vehicle, Greetham said, which then receives a GPS signal that registers its latitude and longitude and transmits it back to a central monitoring station.

&#8220That way, a dispatcher can sit and watch a map on a computer screen with everybody who has the AVL in their vehicle,” he said, adding that the units would be integrated with new $495,000 Computer-Aided Dispatch consoles and a $294,000 in upgraded Motorola radio equipment. The final approval on those purchases is still awaiting approval from the Mississippi Wireless Communication Commission, created late last year after Hurricane Katrina to coordinate communications systems statewide. Greetham said he expects approval from the MWCC, which will also include a go-ahead to move the E-911 Dispatch Center from the basement of the courthouse on Cherry Street to the former Southern Printing building at Clay and First North streets, by late April. The center’s budget for this year was nearly doubled to $1.8 million to add the equipment and staff.

The AVL units would allow dispatchers to move off the &#8220beat system,” where an officer may be at the opposite end of his patrol area from a call, or responding to another call, Greetham said, and instead send the nearest available vehicle to a call regardless of its beat. It could also store data for a certain amount of time – 90 days at the least and probably up to six months or longer – which could be pulled up later if questions arise about response time.

&#8220That’s the most phone calls I get, when people say, ‘A policeman never patrols by my house,’” Leyens said. &#8220I want something where we can pull it up and say, ‘Tell me how many times an officer drove by this house.’”.

Greetham said he requested equipment from Nextel, a leading AVL provider, and drove around the county testing its range and noting trouble spots when the cellular signal was briefly lost. Nextel remains an option, he said, since GPS-based units will have fewer dead zones, but no system will offer much better than &#822090 or 95 percent coverage without spending an exorbitant amount of money.”

&#8220We haven’t really sat down and gone out to the vendors and said ‘This is what we want,’” said Greetham, who estimated the per-unit cost at $300, minimum, depending on the specific type of system set to be installed. &#8220In our case, we’re up and down hills with lots of trees. That eliminates some reception abilities. It’s not like in Kansas where it’s flat and you could put up one tower and cover a whole county.”

Moffett, also a member of the commission, said the VPD could use about 90 units. Sheriff Martin Pace estimated he could equip 30 of his department’s vehicles.

&#8220I would definitely want it on my prisoner transportation units,” Pace said.

Neither Vicksburg Fire Chief Keith Rogers nor Warren County Volunteer Fire Coordinator Kelly Worthy offered an estimate on the number of units either would need for his station’s vehicles.

In other business, the commission: