Sometime in 2027, a 911 call placed from a kitchen on Shurtleff Street in Chelsea will be answered not at the dispatch center on Washington Avenue but in a renovated 125-year-old elementary school on Yeamans Street in Revere. The Metro North Regional Emergency Communications Center, which already handles Revere and Winthrop, will add Chelsea when the McKinley School reopens, and about 81,000 residents of three communities will share one dispatch floor.
Ground was broken in April. The building is under construction. And the question this week’s cyberattack on Everett raises, along with April’s attack on a regional dispatch center in northern Massachusetts, is what three communities are signing up for when they share one set of computers.
The building
The McKinley School at 65 Yeamans Street was built around 1901 and closed as a school years ago. Revere is spending heavily to bring it back: the City Council authorized a $37 million bond in February, the state put in $20 million in grants for the emergency communications center, the school department contributed $6 million in federal pandemic relief funds, and State Representatives Jessica Giannino and Jeffrey Turco and State Senator Lydia Edwards secured a $100,000 earmark. CambridgeSeven is the architect, with PMA Consultants, Trac, WSP and GGD Consulting Engineers on the team.
When it opens, the building will hold two things. Upstairs, in effect, is the dispatch center, described by the city as a tier-one facility. Downstairs is a Revere Public Schools early childhood education center with 210 preschool seats, which doubles the district’s current preschool capacity. “We’re seeing a rebirth of this 125-year-old building filled with immense opportunities,” Mayor Patrick Keefe said at the April 23 groundbreaking, which drew Chelsea City Manager Fidel Maltez, Winthrop Town Manager Tony Marino, Edwards, Turco, and MNRECC director Whitney Morgan.
How Chelsea got here
Chelsea’s City Council voted in March 2025 to join the center, which Revere and Winthrop had already formed. The pitch was efficiency and staffing. The MNRECC budget at the time carried 30 telecommunicators plus a deputy director, an accounting manager, an administrative assistant and an operations consultant, a deeper bench than any one of the three communities could keep on its own. Regional centers also qualify for state 911 grants that single-town centers do not. “Creating efficiencies so that valuable resources can be put towards frontline public safety initiatives, while sharing a stronger workforce, is good governance,” Keefe said when the agreement passed.
The objections were about people and place. Chelsea’s dispatchers’ union raised job security and worker safety; the city answered with an assurance that every current E911 employee would keep a position and seniority. In Winthrop, residents had asked whether dispatchers in another town would know local geography well enough. Chelsea’s emergency management office, which today runs the Emergency Communications Center on Washington Avenue and monitors the city’s fire alarm box system, posted the regionalization studies on its website, including side-by-side comparisons of Chelsea’s costs and wages with Metro North’s.
The shared-risk question
Regional dispatch centers are, on balance, safer than the alternative. They have more staff on a shift, better equipment, redundant phone and radio systems, and a state agency, the State 911 Department, that funds and inspects them. That is why the state pushes consolidation.
But consolidation also concentrates risk. In April, a cyberattack on the Patriot Regional Emergency Communications Center disrupted systems for Pepperell, Ashby, Dunstable, Groton and other towns at once. Call-taking continued, because 911 systems are built to fail over to phones and paper, but the computer-aided dispatch, records and administrative systems that let a dispatcher see a caller’s history or a hydrant map did not. Pepperell’s town administrator said the towns “immediately engaged our insurance provider and reputable outside cybersecurity agencies.” One attack, five towns.
Everett’s experience this week is the other side of the same coin. Its 911 and dispatch stayed up while City Hall went dark, because they were separate. The design question for Metro North is whether the center’s network is walled off from the three member communities’ municipal networks, so that an intrusion at Revere City Hall or Chelsea City Hall or Winthrop Town Hall cannot reach the dispatch floor, and vice versa. That is a technical decision being made now, during construction, and it is one the three governing bodies should ask about in public before the ribbon is cut.
What residents will notice
If it works as designed, nothing. Calls will be answered by trained dispatchers who can see Chelsea’s streets on a screen and send Chelsea’s police, fire and ambulance. The center’s director and staff answer to a board made up of the three communities. What Chelsea gives up is a room in its own city where its own dispatchers sit, and the direct line of accountability that came with it. What it gets is a bigger, better-funded operation. The 2027 opening will tell whether the trade was worth it. The cybersecurity design will tell whether it was safe.