SWAMPSCOTT — As the concept gasps for life elsewhere, Swampscott Town Meeting last night decided that a regional dispatch center was worth pursuing.

Town Meeting voters empowered the selectmen to make Swampscott one of the cities and towns in Essex County that shifts the handling of its emergency and non-emergency police, fire and medical calls to a regional center. The town would pay a per-capita cost for its share of dispatch services.

The regionalization debate took up much of the first night of the Annual Town Meeting in the high school auditorium. Voters also opted to make it a $50 fine to smoke marijuana in public.

After outlining Swampscott's bleak financial outlook, Town Administrator Andrew Maylor argued that the cost-saving benefits of regionalization need to be acknowledged.

"If we do not change, if we do not stop looking at ourselves as just Swampscott but as a part of a region," Maylor said, "then we'll be in the situation we're in for years to come."

Regionalization is common in other states. New Hampshire has four dispatch centers. Texas has less than a dozen centers, Maylor said. Massachusetts, in contrast, has 247 centers.

Swampscott was among 13 cities and towns recently awarded a $6.8 million state grant to build a dispatch center on state-owned land adjacent to the Middleton Jail. The money will be drawn from a surcharge on cell phone and land lines meant to beef up 911 communication statewide.

Opponents said the financial impact was unclear and the risk of making a 10-year commitment to the Middleton center was too great.

"It will be controlled by the state," Neil Rossman said. "It's not an advantage to the town. You don't know what you're buying and you're locking yourself into a system that may or may not work."

Others pointed out that other communities, including neighboring Marblehead, had chosen not to participate after initially expressing interest.

"It's a pig in a poke and we should not be doing it," William Dimento said.

The town's police union passed out a letter at the meeting in opposition to the regional complex, saying: "Why would you replace a system that is not broken?"

But police Chief Ron Madigan said the center would free up officers to patrol the town instead of working as dispatchers. The town would also be spared the cost of upgrading its dispatching technology every few years, he said.

If not the Middleton center, the selectmen could still choose to find a workable alternative among neighboring communities, Maylor said.

"We're provincial in the worst ways," said Chris Drucas, who also argued that regionalization is inevitable because the current model for dispatching in the state is not economically sustainable. "Let's be out in front of it," he said.

Chief Madigan also proposed a bylaw that would make smoking marijuana in public punishable by a $300 fine. Voters, however, endorsed an amendment to reduce the fine to $50, the same amount attached to the public consumption of alcohol.