Dunbarton taxpayers will have to pay twice as much for emergency dispatch services in the coming year.

After pondering a tight budget 2008-09 year, the town of Bow will seek more revenue from Bow Dispatch Service fees collected from Dunbarton, Allenstown, Pembroke and Epsom, the four towns the dispatch center serves.

Dunbarton Police Chief Christopher Connelly was on the same page with police departments in the dispatch service’s coverage area in saying the increase in fees is fair, given the rising costs associated with running Bow Dispatch.

The new annual fees are based on updated call volumes from 2006 plus a $10,000 base fee. Dunbarton, which accounted for the least amount of calls, about 6 percent of the total calls for service in that year, will pay almost $23,000 for 2008-09.

That more than doubles the amount Dunbarton is paying for the current year, which is about $11,000.

“I think it’s an equitable way to do business, based on the calls for service,” said Connelly, adding Bow Dispatch is the most reliable service he’s seen in more than two decades of law enforcement experience.

In 2006, Bow Dispatch took 6,195 calls from Allenstown; 6,682 from Epsom; 10,072 from Pembroke; 2,605 from Dunbarton; and 18,980 from its own town for a total of more than 44,534 calls.

Epsom will now pay $43,000 instead of $19,000; Pembroke, which takes up the largest percentage of service calls besides Bow, will pay about $59,000 instead of $30,000; and Allenstown’s fees increased by about $20,000 to $41,000 for the 2008- 09 year.

Bow Dispatch costs about $400,000 per year to operate. That includes running equipment as well as paying eight employees, five of those being full-time. Since Bow absorbs about half the call volume and owns the center, taxpayers there pay the largest amount.

According to Bow Police Chief Jeff Jaran, the town collected about $79,000 in fees from the four peripheral towns for the current year. Under the new fee system, Bow will collect more than twice that amount, leaving about $235,000 on Bow taxpayers.

Some police chiefs, including Connelly, said they have explored other options such as moving to Merrimack County dispatch service since Bow’s push for a new fee system came to light last summer.

The problem is that Merrimack County dispatch is already overstretched in terms of personnel and space, servicing a total of 13 towns, and such a switch would overwhelm the service and clog the frequencies at this time.

“Their infrastructure presents officer safety concerns with getting air time,” Connelly said. “You can only do so much with the personnel you have and the equipment you’re allotted.”

Further, Connelly said, Dunbarton may not realize a savings in doing that after applying the costs to switch over the current information system his officers use, which is connected with Bow Dispatch to record all the necessary information from the call, thereby eliminating a lot of tedious work in entering the incident information into the system like many other departments have to do.

“Really, Bow continues to be our best option and is really in the same ballpark where we could go with other services,” Connelly said, adding the new fees have been added into the proposed 2008-09 police budget, totalling $321,274.