The Foothills Regional Emergency Services Commission is on the move to Okotoks.

The Commission decided they'd outgrown their location at Oilfields General Hospital in Black Diamond after being centred there for about 23 years.

Suzanne Oel, chairperson for FRESC, says their new building in Okotoks presented the best opportunity.

"With the technology they have at the building we're moving to we will be able to provide that next level of service, so improving technology and having state of the art communications lines, we'll have new telephone lines, access to fibre optics, and we'll be able to provide next generation 911."

This will include the ability to text or email photos and video clips to first responders in the future.

Aside from 911 responses for police, fire, and EMS, the Commission also has a growing peace officer monitoring component, work alone monitoring, deals with municipal complaints and emergency answers for some communities, and sends out messages from SCAN, the Safe Communities Alert Network.

Oel says they're not entirely giving up their location at Oilfields.

"It's important for 911 centres to have back up servers and eventualities. We help each other out when there's call overflows or in a situation if you had an emergency where you couldn't operate out of your centre you need a back up location so Black Diamond will continue to function as our back up location there."

Grant funding was provided to FRESC for the move from the province.

The Commission expects to be operating out of Okotoks in October.

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