NENA CEO Brian Fontes announces plan to step down in fall 2025

NENA CEO Brian Fontes last week unveiled plans to step down from the 911-focused organization’s leadership position during the fall of 2025, which would mark the end of a 17-year stint heading NENA.

Fontes said serving as the CEO for NENA has been “an absolutely incredible, amazing experience” since accepting the job in June 2008 after working for Cingular Wireless and AT&T. Current plans call for Fontes to continue as NENA’s CEO until the fall and then serve the organization in an advisory role.

“The board will go out with their process in securing the next CEO, but I’m still here at NENA as CEO,” Fontes said during an interview last Friday with Urgent Communications. “I’ll still be making decisions. I’ll still be working closely with the board and staff.

“And even when I do step down, I told the board that if the board—whatever that board is, the new board—and the new CEO needs me to do anything, I’m certainly available to help out. I didn’t invest 16 years—it will be 17 years [in the fall]—of my life just to walk away. I’m committed to NENA. I want to see it succeed, and if there is any help I can provide in my post-CEO world, I’m there 100%. I believe that much in the organization.”

Fontes said he believes “the time is right” for a new NENA CEO to lead the organization, which he believes is in a strong position with more than 23,000 members.

“The first thing is me having the ability to say, ‘The time is right,’” Fontes said. “The second thing—and most important in aiding my decision—is the strength of the organization.

“From where it was [in 2008] to where it is now, this is a very strong, healthy time NENA to look to the next CEO to build upon what was built by the board, the staff and myself over the years, to take it to a new level. I’m very excited. I have no idea who that person will be, but I’m very excited, because it’s new blood, new thought, new ideas, and it’s the next generation of improvement for the organization.”

“It is just such a good time for this transition—a good time for NENA, and I’m very happy about it. I’m excited to see what lies ahead, both for NENA and myself.”

NENA President Melanie Jones said the organization plans to launch its search for a new CEO during the spring, noting that the next person in the leadership role will have “extremely tough shoes to fill” in succeeding Fontes.

“It’s certainly a huge loss for NENA,” Jones said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “Brian has certainly built up our organization, and he’s increased our membership over 400% since he came on board as the CEO.

“We are very happy that Brian agreed to stay on in an advisory purpose for that new person, because the guidance that he’s provided over the past 16 years—and it will soon be 17—for the staff and board will take some training. Whoever that new person is hopefully will be willing to listen, because they’re going to need to fill those shoes in a respectful way.”

Jason Barbour, who was NENA’s president in 2008 and led the effort to recruit Fontes to the CEO job, echoed this sentiment.

“What Brian has done during the last 17 years way exceeds any expectation that we, as the board, had 17 years ago,” Barbour said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “Brian’s taken it way past any thought that we had for the association.

Barbour said the hiring of Fontes was significant, because he was the first NENA CEO as the board in 2008 decided to alter the association’s organizational structure.

“When this position was made available, we—the board at that time—were trying to change the governance model of the association,” Barbour said. “Previously, the position that Brian was in was titled ‘executive director,’ and the association had some historical learnings from that.

“You could make a strong argument that, each time a volunteer president was elected each year, the association had the ability to go in a completely different direction—which didn’t seem to be what the board at that time thought was best for the association. So, our first objective was to get the board to agree to a CEO-type leadership, versus an executive-director leadership.”

Once that was done, Barbour decided that Fontes was his “number-one pick” to be the NENA CEO, based largely on watching Fontes work with other key stakeholders on topics like location accuracy for wireless 911 callers.

“I got to see his [Fontes’] leadership, his wisdom and his calmness,” Barbour said. “I went to the board and said, ‘This is who I want to hire.’ I got a lot of laughs and [comments like], ‘Good luck with that. He’ll never come work for us.’”

Indeed, Fontes was working for Cingular Wireless when the company was acquired by AT&T as part of its BellSouth purchase, but he was drawn to the NENA CEO job. The attraction to NENA was based largely on Fontes interest in tackling public-safety issues, dating back to his work with the FCC in the 1980s.

“After the transaction, AT&T was extraordinarily nice to me, but I decided to leave to go to NENA,” Fontes said. “The short reason for that was that the fire in my belly from that $47 billion cash transaction and my time at Cingular was fading, and I needed a new fire in my belly to get me up in the morning, to make me excited about the day, to feel that—in some small way—I can have an impact on something.

“Then, Jason [Barbour] comes along and dangles this opportunity in front of me, and I felt the fire in my belly building again. And that’s what made me turn down the very nice, lucrative world of the private sector to deal with that issue of 911 stoking that fire in my belly to improve 911. I could not be happier.”

Fontes said he is most proud of the working relationship between NENA’s board of directors and the organization’s staff, as well as the development of NENA’s educational program.

Two key tasks Fontes would like to see accomplished in the near future are the federal reclassification of 911 professionals as public-safety personnel, instead of being categorized with clerical staff. In addition, Fontes reiterated his belief that Congress should approve federal funding to pay for the transition of 911 centers from legacy systems to next-generation 911 (NG911) technology.

“We’ve been close for too many Congresses,” Fontes said. “It’s time for Congress to step up and recognize that 911 no longer is just an individual’s safety net for emergency; it is now for a community, or a school, or a post office, or a factory. It’s a community for security and safety, and the government needs to step up and move 911 into the 21st century.”