With a new evidence technician and crime scene specialist on board, Westbrook Police Department joined seven other communities Wednesday in forming a regional forensic crime laboratory.

Representatives from the eight cities and towns and their police departments, including Westbrook Mayor Bruce Chuluda and Police Chief Bill Baker, met at the Portland Police Department Wednesday to sign on to the regional crime laboratory.

It’s the first project of the Metro Regional Coalition, which was formed to pursue collaborative opportunities for Greater Portland area municipalities.

The experience of the Westbrook Police Department’s newest addition, Officer David Finocchietti, who was sworn in last week, now won’t only benefit the city, but also the region.

Finocchietti, 44, comes to the city from the Biddeford Police Department, where he worked for 14 years. According to Baker, he is the only person in Maine to have graduated from the University of Tennessee’s National Forensic Academy 10-week crime scene school.

“We’re really, really fortunate to have him,” Baker said.

Finnochietti said he’s looking forward to being able to use the new crime lab, which is “an added bonus” to coming to work for Westbrook. Biddeford is not one of the communities to sign on to the regional crime lab. Other communities participating are Portland, Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, Scarborough, South Portland, Windham and Yarmouth.

Baker said he believes sharing personnel and equipment to work on crime scene investigations “makes a lot of sense.” However, he said, because of Finnochietti’s experience, Westbrook will probably be helping other departments more than getting help from them.

“It’s going to be an advantage to everybody else,” he said about Finnochietti working with the regional lab. “We’ve got one of the tops in the trade.”

The regional crime laboratory, a $2 million facility to be built at the Portland Police Department, will have digital imaging and video processing capabilities as well as computer forensics equipment that will help the police departments recover evidence from computers and fight Internet crimes. It is scheduled to open in fall 2009.

The participating police departments will also be able to utilize national and tri-state fingerprinting databases and will have access to the latest technology for latent fingerprint recovery, which will alleviate the demand on the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory.

The new laboratory equipment will also improve the quality of evidence collected from a crime and standardize the processing of that evidence for the participating communities.

“This inter-local agreement is an excellent example of what the Greater Portland area can do when we work together and pool our resources,” said James Cohen, chairman of the Metro Regional Coalition.

“A state-of-the-art crime lab has been an important need for the city for more than a decade. The new crime lab will help not only Portland but a number of communities in the county solve crimes faster and more efficiently,” he said.

Officer David Finnochietti, Westbrook’s new evidence technician and crime scene specialist, says having access to a regional crime lab, which Westbrook signed an agreement to join Wednesday, is “an added bonus” to working for the city.

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