Natchez and Adams County residents will soon have a much more streamlined system to get help when they call for help.

For years and years, the Natchez Police Department and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office have operated two separate radio-dispatching departments, each staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

With an agreement signed this week, the two entities will soon merge into one common, county-wide dispatching unit housed at the county’s emergency management office located beneath the Adams County Jail.

The move is a smart one that offers two key benefits.

First, once operational a single group of trained professionals will answer emergency calls and dispatch the appropriate aid.

That will be a far cry from the previous, decades-old system in which city dispatchers transferred telephone calls to the county sheriff’s office and vice versa.

The long-term potential for the combined, shared service is the potential for substantial savings. Although initial plans call for all the existing positions — city and county — to be retained, obvious savings can be expected when the department is fully optimized as to staffing.

We applaud the county’s E-911 board, emergency management director Robert Bradford as well as city and county leaders for working together to resolve this longstanding inadequacy in our community’s emergency management system.