The county’s 911 Advisory Board tonight reached a compromise on funding the 911 Center for the upcoming fiscal year but more deliberation is expected to find a permanent solution.

Tonight’s decision, recommended by board Chair Joe Williams, leaves the current funding method in place but requires all municipalities in the county to make up the more than $28,000 difference between the current budget and the projected budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

The meeting tonight was a continuation of one last week where no solution was reached and board members asked the county for other options.

(The advisory board’s next meeting will be March 13 at 5:45 p.m. in the old commissioners’ room next to the Historic Courthouse in Halifax)

The municipalities would pay that money based on a percentage of their current call volume.

County commissioners must still sign off on the proposal and County Manager Tony Brown said following the meeting he would not make a recommendation to the county’s governing panel until he reviewed the numbers more thoroughly.

The county manager came to the meeting with six proposals, none of which were fully satisfactory to members of the advisory board.

“You’re asking small towns to come up with more money,” Littleton Mayor Diana Bobbitt said. “It’s asking too much.”

Williams, who is also Scotland Neck’s police chief, said the proposal he gave gives the towns more time to come up with a better solution. “Yes, it’s going to get worse. It’s putting us all in a bind to make this decision.”

While the county will fund 60.58 percent of the 911 Center operating cost, Brown explained, “My agenda has never been to reduce the county’s cost. This is based on what we agreed upon. We don’t have to have this conversation. The role we’re playing here is not to put the county at an unfair advantage.”

Roanoke Rapids City Manager Joseph Scherer, who ended up seconding the motion of Bobbitt to go with Williams’ recommendation, said, “For right now it seems to make the most sense.”

Said Williams: “This will give us an opportunity to talk our (town) board.”

Bobbitt said each municipality must pay a minimum based on the number of calls.

The matter became an issue because Scotland Neck paid nothing to the center this year. Hobgood, which has no police department, also paid nothing.

“We’re trying to figure out a way to not have the same problem,” Brown said. “We don’t want to have this conversation every year.”

Brown said this has been an issue for the past year and first came up last summer during an intergovernmental meeting. “We’ve been looking at this for a year now. No one should be surprised.”

Scherer said following the meeting Roanoke Rapids would pay $110,000, about a $33,000 increase from the current fiscal year.

Brown explained afterward the $28,994 comes from the difference in the projected $935,225 it will cost to run the center in the upcoming fiscal year and this year’s $906,231.