That’s why Virginia Beach, Va., and four neighboring jurisdictions are rolling out a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) integration project this fall, aiming to close those communication gaps and bridge the divide between dispatch systems. The initiative will connect the CAD systems of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk — allowing dispatchers in one city to send emergency call data directly to a neighboring city’s system.
At the center of it all is a data exchange hub powered by CentralSquare Unify, which serves as middleware to link the participating cities’ CAD platforms. The tool includes an interface that administrators or technical staff can use to configure business rules — like standardizing how each system labels fire trucks, emergency types or unit statuses — but it’s built to essentially operate in the background.
While the Unify application includes features like maps and tools to view cross-jurisdiction incidents and units, everyday dispatchers won’t interact with that back-end interface. Instead, they’ll continue working within their own CAD system, where updates and requests from other cities will appear just like internal calls.
“Before discovering this tool, we used to get calls more frequently from other jurisdictions that we would then have to transfer over to them, meaning now we’re in their queue, and the citizen is still having to wait,” Jada Lee, director of Emergency Communications and Citizen Services for Virginia Beach, said. “With the CAD-to-CAD project, it will allow us to process the call and then send it to the other agency’s CAD system with very little delay.”
That kind of smooth handoff builds on existing regional practices, according to Josh Nelson, Virginia Beach IT solutions manager. The city, he said, already has automatic aid agreements with neighboring jurisdictions like Chesapeake and Norfolk. For instance, if there’s a house fire near a city line, their current dispatch system can identify which engine is closest, even if it belongs to another city.
What was missing, according to Nelson, was the ability to act on that information automatically — a gap that Virginia Beach has been looking to close for years through regional CAD integration. When the city implemented its current Motorola PremierOne CAD system in 2018, it included CAD-to-CAD functionality in the original request for proposals. But technical and governance hurdles nixed that portion of the project at the time. The effort was revived in 2021 when the city selected CentralSquare through a new procurement process, but building consensus among multiple jurisdictions proved to be slow initially.
“There was interest, but there were concerns about funding,” Nelson said. “We had to work through a lot of that before implementation could even begin.”
Once a vendor was selected, the project faced delays around lack of an active interface to Virginia Beach’s CAD system — an issue that has since been resolved. The team, Nelson said, is now in a situation where there are cities that are “actively testing on the hub and are going to have an interface that's complete and ready to be tested for implementation within the next two weeks.” With momentum building, the full system launch is expected by this fall.
Supporting that technical progress is a strong governance structure. An executive board composed of fire chiefs from all five participating cities has developed shared procedures, while steering and technical committees meet regularly to handle day-to-day decisions for the project’s success and sustainability.
As the CAD-to-CAD system moves closer to implementation, cybersecurity and interoperability are top priorities, Nelson said. The team has been identifying potential risks to ensure the system is as resilient as possible across jurisdictions, by completing threat modeling and vendor viability checks to make sure any system compromise is isolated and doesn’t affect the others.
Successful cross-jurisdictional emergency tech integrations depend as much on collaboration and stakeholder buy-in as they do on infrastructure, Virginia Beach officials emphasized.
“If it doesn’t work for the people involved, then it doesn’t work for any of us,” Nelson said. “This isn’t just a technology project — it’s embedded in deep operations processes.”
And with staffing shortages continuing to challenge emergency communications centers nationwide, Lee stressed that the need for smart, tech-driven solutions is only growing more urgent.
“Finding technology that helps us to still provide a quality service, but make it more efficient, is where most dispatch centers, especially larger dispatch centers, are moving to,” she said.
Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify details about the project’s development.
