Dispatch centers for Allegheny County (Pa.) and Pittsburgh will take the final step next month in a merger that started a decade ago when the governments combined their 9-1-1 emergency call centers, officials said on Wednesday.

Dispatchers, who are Allegheny County employees, will start training next week to answer calls countywide. The dispatch center has two phone banks with separate dispatchers for calls from the city and for calls from the rest of the county, Emergency Services Chief Alvin Henderson said.

“It creates greater efficiency. It creates the ability for the call times to become much less. It allows a better opportunity for the responders to be there earlier to be able to save lives,” Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said about cross-training dispatchers.

Neither Peduto nor Henderson could say how much response times would be reduced. Henderson said training dispatchers to answer all calls will help the center better respond to emergencies, such as flooding from heavy storms, in specific parts of the county or city.

The training happens as county Executive Rich Fitzgerald and Peduto continue to lobby Harrisburg to improve funding for 9-1-1 centers.

Under the current formula, centers receive subsidies based on the number of landlines in a county and can apply to the state for a portion of fees collected from mobile devices. That could leave Allegheny County’s center short by $6.4 million this year, Fitzgerald said.

The county’s 9-1-1 center in Point Breeze receives 1.3 million calls a year. Calls from the city account for 40 percent of the center’s volume, Peduto said.

The 9-1-1 center promoted 12 part-time dispatchers to full-time to cut overtime costs, which approached $2 million in 2013, Henderson said. Training dispatchers will take three to four weeks. The center has 214 employees.

Completing the 9-1-1 merger is the first major collaboration between the city and the county under the Peduto administration. Peduto and Fitzgerald promised greater cooperation and potential consolidation of services between the city and county.

The city and county consolidated 9-1-1 dispatch centers in 2005. In 2010, city and county dispatchers started using the same software, Henderson said.

Rick Grejda, a spokesman for the Service Employees International Union Local 668, which represents 9-1-1center employees, said he learned of the planned cross-training on Wednesday afternoon. Union officials want more information from the county’s law department, he said.

Grejda, a former dispatcher, said he’s concerned the merger might remove some safeguards, such as the ability for one system to back up the other in the event of a failure. The center’s backup systems will not be affected by the merger, county spokeswoman Amie Downs said.