Public Safety Needs Federal Funding to Get to NG-911, IWCE Told
Speakers supported next-generation 911 funding from Congress, in a discussion at the virtual IWCE conference. Other speakers said the COVID-19 pandemic continues to present huge challenges for 911 call centers. And 911 remains “woefully behind in technology,” said Jeff Cohen, APCO chief counsel during a Monday panel: “In many ways, we’re not going down the right path.” APCO supports a “massive grant program” to fund NG-911. “We’ve got a really good opportunity,” he said.
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Federal funding isn’t “necessary, it’s essential, if we’re going to move 911 into the 21st century,” said Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association. Today, most people have smartphones, he said. “But when it comes to 911, that link between the public and those who respond to emergencies, we are stuck in a voice-centric, not data-driven world,” he said.
Fontes noted that for years, data minutes on carrier networks have exceeded voice minutes and FirstNet was designed to be a data network. “There’s no question that we need to make that investment to ensure that we have information-rich communication coming in from those people in their time of need when they reach out to 911,” he said: “We also have the capability of pushing that information-rich call, and the data associated with that, to those who are responding to emergencies.”
The House included funding for NG-911 in COVID-19 legislation, Fontes said. “We hold out hope, hope springs eternal, that something will move Congress to enact finding for next-generation 911,” he said.
Getting to NG-911 has been difficult, but the concept is simple, Cohen said. “We want an interoperable channel between the citizens and the next-gen environment, it’s going to be devices and things, to the 911 center,” he said. “We need interoperability between emergency communications centers, no matter where they’re located, and we also need interoperability in the broadband networks serving first responders,” including FirstNet, he said.
Oakland County, Michigan, faces a “slowing of collections, between carriers, between the state surcharge and county surcharge,” said Mel Maier, captain in the county’s Sheriff's Office. The county will have a 15%-20% hit to its budget this year. That will “have a long-lasting impact as we move forward for on 911 services in the county,” he said.
Another big problem is that being a 911 operator is a “tough job,” Maier said. It’s difficult to retain operators and expensive to train them, he said. “We’ve had to raise the pay,” he said: “We’ve had to do more recruiting out in the real world, which we never had to do before. We’ve had to really be creative in the way that we look at benefits and the way that we do staffing for shifts.” In the COVID-19 era, operators also have to deal with frequent changes in their protocol, he said. NG-911 and changing technology is also a complication for 911 call centers, Maier said. “When we suddenly start getting all these calls through all these different manners we have to be prepared to … respond and to call these people back if necessary, which has been really a challenge,” he said.
COVID-19 response “has been a roller coaster,” said Tyrell Morris, executive director of the Orleans Parish Communication District in Louisiana. “We knew that this COVID-19 pandemic was going to redefine what it meant to be in the field of emergency communications.”
New Orleans started to prepare in February, the city had any COVID-19 cases, Morris said. The parish adopted a new protocol, under which ambulances weren’t dispatched when people had minor symptoms and a hospital emergency room could do little to help them. Instead, they would get a video call to assess the symptoms, he said. At one point, 60% of emergency medical service personnel were out with COVID-19 symptoms or under quarantine, he said: “This was an attempt to save our resources and really use them for people that needed them the most.”