New Hampshire state representative Kermit Williams (D-Wilton) said it’s up in the air as to what will happen with the three-town emergency network known as MACC base.

The Milford Area Communications Center, jointly owned by Milford, Wilton and Mont Vernon is in jeopardy.

“If Milford, in an effort to move away from MACC base, pulls out, that would make it financially unworkable for us,” said Williams. “Wilton and Mont Vernon would have to figure out what we’re going to do.”

William said while the MACC base exists within these three towns, “there’s other stuff going on with emergency communications in the state.”

One is First Net which Gov. Sununu has been working on but Williams isn’t sure how that would tie in, if at all.

“I tried to find out from the Milford people but they said they didn’t really see that as being important,” he said. “They want to spend something in excess of $2 million – they’re going to have a warrant article. They just had their deliberative session. And in the warrant article that they’re bringing forward to bond this effort and they would build a new communications center and then they would offer Wilton the opportunity to join as a customer, but we’d have to pay for all the infrastructure costs on our side which they estimate is about a million bucks.

The question on everyone’s mind seems to be is such a revamp of the system necessary? Williams isn’t sure there just one answer.

“I think the problem is that the Milford police department doesn’t like the way that MACC base has worked,” he said. “They’d like to have something that they have more control over. So, they’re pushing on that but it’s going to be a real issue for Wilton. We’re neighbors – we’d like to stay connected with Milford. We do a lot of mutual aid with them.”

Williams said if the warrant article passes next month, he believes that they’d start building right away.

As chair of the select board, Williams has been deeply involved in this.

“It’s an all-hands on deck sort of thing to figure out what to do,” he said. “If Milford goes ahead with this we have to decide if we’re going to come up with the money ourselves or are we going to look for another service to align with. If we do that, that’s going to really be a big change for us. No matter what we do would be a big change for us.”

Williams fears that will separate Wilton from Milford, especially if they’re connect to some other town.

“We could connect to Keene — they have a big service connect to lots of towns,” he said. “Theoretically, we could hook in with some other towns. Or we could try to take MACC base ourselves and try to get other towns to join in to make it affordable. Right now, Milford pays 71% of the operating budget. For the little towns to pick that up that would be difficult.”