NATCHEZ — Adams County and Natchez city officials will meet this week to discuss ways to improve and possibly consolidate the area’s 911 service.

The Tuesday meeting at the Adams County Emergency Management office will include city and county law enforcement, fire officials and the county emergency management director, Supervisor David Carter said.

Currently, all 911 calls are directed to the City of Natchez’s dispatch office, and those located outside the city limits are then transferred to the Adams County Sheriff’s Office for dispatching, Sheriff Chuck Mayfield said.

“One of the reasons I would like to have a central dispatch is I think we can get those calls dispatched a little quicker to the county,” Mayfield said.

The sheriff said Tuesday’s meeting would be a “fact-finding session.”

Any centralized dispatch for 911 services would likely have to be at a separate location, Mayfield said.

“In our office, the setup right now can expand a little and it could be possibly done there for a little while, but that’s something that we will have discuss at the meeting,” he said.

Carter said he arranged the meeting after a recent discussion of the board of supervisors in which some of the supervisors expressed concerns that city dispatchers might not always dispatch county fire services to the scenes of fires first.

During the discussion, however, former Emergency Management Director Stan Owens said the issue was not one of city versus county dispatch services, but of a need for a consolidated dispatch location to improve public safety communication.

Carter said the fire discussion was one component of the issue, but it will not be the focus of the meeting. The goal is to improve public safety by improving all aspects of communication and dispatch, he said.

“I have talked personally with the police, the fire chief and the sheriff, and I don’t think anybody is opposed to what we are trying to do,” he said. “All we are really doing is meeting and bringing everybody together, because the people who need to make these decisions are the people in charge of those (public safety) departments.”

Because the discussion needs to be non-political, the session will be directed by the Emergency 911 board members and Emergency Management Director Robert Bradford Sr., Carter said.

“The police and sheriff do a good job now, but we need everybody to get behind this to make it work properly,” he said.

Bradford and Natchez Police Chief Danny White could not be reached for comment.