Funding for 911 system falls short
Hopes that Congress will appropriate even a modest amount of money to help pay for upgrades to public-safety answering points, or PSAPs, continue to wane as the item is conspicuously absent from initial budget proposals for fiscal 2007.
In 2004, Congress passed the ENHANCE 911 Act, which authorized as much as $250 million annually to pay for PSAP upgrades during a five-year period. However, Capitol Hill has yet to appropriate any money to support the act, and appropriations bills emerging from the Senate Transportation and Commerce committees did not include money to support matching grants for PSAP upgrades.
“There’s a lot of push on a number of funding issues, but, unfortunately, we have not heard even a whisper of a plan to make any of that happen,” said Wanda McCarley, president of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO).
In an attempt to gather momentum for the effort, APCO and the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) conducted a joint press conference last month with the Congressional E911 Caucus to outline the importance of making grants available for PSAP upgrades.
“In an emergency, time is the most critical element in saving lives. E911 technology saves time and, therefore, saves lives,” Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) said in a statement. “Lives will be saved from this funding and we’re going to do all we can to make sure it happens.”
Early returns from this plea were disappointing, as the dual $21 million funding requests made by Burns and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) were not included in pending appropriations bills.
But the need for funding has not disappeared. NENA has estimated that at least $335 million is needed to bring all PSAPs in the nation in compliance with Wireless E911 Phase II guidelines, which require call takers to automatically receive the location and phone number of a wireless phone caller seeking emergency assistance. Currently, more than half the counties in 24 states lack a PSAP that meets the Phase II guidelines (see box).
“The reason we don’t have wall-to-wall 911 coverage in the U.S. — and the reason we don’t have Phase II coverage nationwide — is simply that some places can’t afford it,” NENA President Bill Munn said. “The more sparsely populated areas haven’t been able to afford the kind of fee structure needed to pay for 911, so there are areas where federal help is needed.”
While hopes for funding the ENHANCE 911 Act wane, NENA officials have been encouraged by indications that other issues may be addressed in the comprehensive rewrite of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The Senate Commerce Committee passed several NENA-supported amendments in its draft of the bill, including stipulations that would let 911-upgrade funding be used for next-generation PSAP buildouts that utilize IP technology.
The most important of these is an amendment that would let $1 billion in interoperability funding — supported by projected proceeds from the 700 MHz auction to be conducted by early 2008 — be used to pay for PSAP upgrades. Although that auction is a year and a half away, there has been a push on Capitol Hill to make the interoperability money available as early as this fall.
Interoperability funds typically have been limited to paying for efforts to establish radio interoperability, but using interoperability funds for PSAP upgrades makes sense, because centers serve as the “eyes and the ears of the public” in fielding emergency calls, said Patrick Halley, NENA’s government affairs director.
“In our opinion, if you don’t have a fully functioning 911 system, then your overall communications system is not interoperable,” Halley said.
APCO and NENA have been united in support of funding for the Enhanced 911 Act, but the organizations differ on this matter. APCO officials have expressed fears that expanding the definition of interoperability in this instance could lead to such funding being diverted to other uses in the future. In addition, they are concerned that letting PSAPs use interoperability funds would mean that Congress would stop trying to find funds dedicated to the ENHANCE 911 Act.
“We see the need to make sure that [funding] gets used in the very critical arena of radio interoperability,” McCarley said.
When the full Senate will consider the issue is a source of considerable speculation. The amendment is part of the telecom bill, which is fraught with controversial debates over so-called network neutrality and myriad jurisdictional matters. Lacking the votes to override a filibuster, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) reportedly does not expect the bill to reach the Senate floor until September, giving elected officials time to reach consensus or restructure the legislation.
Glenn Bischoff contributed to this article.
BY THE NUMBERS
State wireless Phase II deployment
(by percentage of counties)
14
Number of states with 95% or more counties served
5
Number of states with 75 to 95% of counties served
7
Number of states with 50 to 75% of counties served
10
Number of states with 25 to 50% of counties served
14
Number of states with 0 to 25% of counties served
Source: National Emergency Number Association
