Roanoke County and Vinton are set to begin an in-depth study of the feasibility of merging their 911 call centers.

In a work session at the Vinton War Memorial on Tuesday, the Vinton Town Council and the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors heard a presentation from staff on a preliminary investigation of the proposal.

"There appear to be many positives," said supervisors Chairman Mike Altizer, who represents the Vinton District.

"What I want the staffs to try to work on are the roadblocks or obstacles we have to overcome."

Vinton Town Manager Chris Lawrence and Roanoke County Chief Information Officer Elaine Carver, who oversees the county's dispatch operation, presented the results they've gathered.

They headed teams of town and county employees to gauge the potential benefits and pitfalls of a communications center merger.

In the process, they visited existing combined dispatching facilities in York and Albemarle counties, both of which reported major successes with the combined operations.

In both locations, a unified center served a county with rural and urban elements, a city or town, and in Albemarle's case, a major university. With each, a major difficulty in the beginning had been the acquisition of compatible radio systems, something that Roanoke County and Vinton already share, Lawrence and Carver said.

A merger would require some Roanoke County staff to become adept at dispatching public works crews, something they don't do now.

Vinton oversees its own streets and water and sewer system, and its dispatchers send crews to trouble spots.

County dispatchers are getting some familiarity with that already, however, in an experiment to handle after-midnight calls for the Western Virginia Water Authority.

Vinton budgets for eight dispatching positions, only six of which are filled at the moment. Those employees would be moved to the county's new state-of-the-art dispatching center in its public safety headquarters on Cove Road.

Roanoke County now has about that many dispatchers on duty at any given time.

Determining which locality the current Vinton employees would work for, and how their compensation would be funded, is still to be resolved.

Although council members and supervisors had some questions, primarily about costs, all those in attendance enthusiastically endorsed the idea of proceeding with the merger study.

A report detailing such things as costs, training estimates, service enhancements and other impacts of the merger is scheduled to be presented by the end of September.

The earliest any staff movement could happen would be the end of the year, Lawrence said.