Police chiefs from eight communities in southern Maine, along with city and town officials, met at the Portland Police Department Wednesday to sign onto participating in a regional forensic crime lab.

Portland Police Chief Tim Burton said the lab will cost about $1.5 million to build, and will be constructed at the site of the former Portland police gymnasium. Each participating community will help pay for the lab in an amount proportional to its population.

The lab is the first project of the Metro Regional Coalition, which was formed to pursue collaborative opportunities for Greater Portland communities.

“This is a model for how we can work together in other areas,” said Jim Cohen, chairman of the Metro Regional Coalition and a Portland city councilor.

Equipment in the lab will give the departments digital imaging and video processing capabilities and help them recover evidence from computers and fight Internet crimes. It is scheduled to open in fall 2009.

In addition to the equipment, which most of the departments would otherwise not be able to afford, by giving all of the evidence technicians, who have different specialties, access to each other, “every technician’s training can be elevated,” Burton said, without the cost of actually going through a program.

“We’ll be able to teach each other,” he said.

The participating police departments – Portland, Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, Scarborough, South Portland, Westbrook, Windham and Yarmouth – 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 Cohen.

“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.

Scarborough Police Chief Rob Moulton, Cape Elizabeth Police Chief Neil Williams, Westbrook Police Chief Bill Baker and Westbrook Mayor Bruce Chuluda chat at the Portland Police Department Wednesday after signing onto supporting a regional crime lab, along with five other communities.

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