Mike Kelly, Herald News (Passaic County, NJ)

You could almost hear the cheering across North Jersey last week as police and fire officials voiced support for proposed federal legislation to buy them new radios and fulfill a post-9/11 mandate to unify their disjointed communications system.

But are these officials ready for the next step — regionalization?

The next sound you hear may be a collective grunt.

Regionalizing communications is not mentioned in new legislation, proposed by Rep. Steve Rothman, D-Fair Lawn, to appropriate $400 million for upgraded emergency radios that conform to new federal guidelines taking effect in 2013. But a wide range of emergency experts say the radios may be the most important key to forcing police to combine services — and, eventually, whole departments.

Simply put, the new radios would place all police and fire departments on so-called narrow-band radio frequencies. Currently, that’s not always the case, especially in small departments.

“There is a relationship between frequencies and fiefdoms,” said Glenn Corbett, a former Waldwick assistant fire chief and John Jay College professor who testified before the 9/11 Commission on emergency communications failures.

“The more fiefdoms you have,” Corbett said, “the more frequencies you have.”

But will reducing the frequencies reduce the fiefdoms?

There are more than 100 separate police and fire departments across North Jersey. Many have deep, intimate and emotional roots in their towns. But you don’t need a graduate degree in business management to realize that some departments could easily be combined to save money and reduce redundancy — and perhaps increase efficiency.

“The devil is in the details,” said Ramsey Police Chief Bryan Gurney, president of the Bergen County Police Chiefs Association and a proponent of keeping many small-town departments.

For years in state politics, any discussion of regionalization was treated as treason.

But the rising movement to reduce municipal taxes — and expenditures — raises a question: If schools can be forced to combine services, what about police and fire departments?

One of the first steps toward answering that question may be smoothing out differences in the way police and fire departments communicate.

Simply put, if the diverse and old radio frequencies used by many North Jersey emergency units are transferred to a more unified bandwidth on the radio spectrum, officials say, it’s only natural for police and fire departments to consider the next step of combining all of their operations.

“It will facilitate that process,” Rothman said of his proposed bill’s impact on regionalization. But the first order of business, he said, is modernizing emergency communications.

“The main goal is to have every police, fire and emergency department in New Jersey and throughout the country able to speak with one another,” Rothman said. “Everything else will flow from that. Once everyone has functional radios, they’ll be able to talk to one another.”

The inability of police and fire units at the World Trade Center to communicate became a matter of life and death on Sept. 11, 2001.

New York City police were ordered to evacuate the Twin Towers. But New York City firefighters’ radios were not tuned into the police frequency.

Now some experts say the disparate death toll — 23 New York City police officers and 343 New York City firefighters — is due to the poor communications. Indeed, one analysis estimated that up to 100 firefighters might have been saved — mostly from the north tower — if the police evacuation order had been properly transmitted on fire department radios.

But to blame the disparate radio frequencies for the high 9/11 death toll of emergency responders is not entirely fair.

A key problem was the traditional rivalry between New York City’s police and fire departments, known as “cultural inoperability.”

“Cops and fire did not want to talk to each other,” said Corbett, who played a key role in helping to rewrite fire codes in high-rise buildings after the 9/11 attacks. “They had separate command posts, separate radios.”

Corbett said another factor added to the death toll — a lack of so-called repeater devices in the remote corners of the Twin Towers that would help to amplify radio signals and allow firefighters and police to hear them. Now, thanks to the efforts of Corbett and others, more high-rise buildings have repeater devices.

These kinds of changes in New York, along with a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, to create common emergency radio spectrums sparked a national movement to ease differences in how police and firefighters communicate.

One of the key changes was a ruling by the Federal Communications Commission to require all police departments nationwide to move their radio channels to the so-called narrow-band section of the radio spectrum. The problem is that such a mandate did not carry funding for police and fire units to buy new radios.

This is where Rothman’s proposed legislation, which is co-sponsored by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., will help.

The United States has 18,760 law enforcement agencies and police departments. More than 20,000 fire departments are registered with the U.S. Fire Administration, with up to 1,000 small-town departments that may be unregistered.

If passed as it stands, Rothman’s legislation, which is actually an amendment to a larger bill, would have enough money for all police and fire departments to buy new radios that link to the narrow-band frequencies. But the emotional and political costs of regionalizing may be impossible to estimate.

New Milford Police Chief Frank Papapietro favors a central dispatching system for his force, but not if it closes down the local police department.

“I would still want a cop on the desk,” he said. “People are used to that.”

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