Leaders of the National Association of State 911 Administrators and National Emergency Number Association are urging Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to preserve “a strong role” for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s National 911 Program amid the Trump administration’s government-wide workforce cuts. The program “has been crucial in coordinating state and local 9-1-1 systems -- an area that no other federal entity addresses,” said NASNA Executive Director Harriet Rennie-Brown and NENA CEO Brian Fontes in a letter to Duffy. “This coordination is more essential than ever as over 5,000 local 9-1-1 centers transition to” next-generation 911 technology. “Without support from the National 9-1-1 Program Office, local jurisdictions will struggle with interoperability between and among agencies and jurisdictions -- a key public safety component,” they said. “This is particularly true on our nation’s highways, where an estimated one-third of all 9-1-1 calls originate and where effective coordination and interoperability can save lives.”

The FCC’s outage reporting rules and its history of assessing large penalties for violations are leading to public safety answering points (PSAPs) being heavily burdened by notifications, said attorneys, trade groups and public safety associations. New rules that go into effect April 15 are likely to exacerbate the issue, they said during an FCBA virtual panel discussion Monday.

Backers of federal funding for next-generation 911 tech upgrades told us they remain hopeful that lawmakers will reach an agreement on a spectrum title in a budget reconciliation measure that allocates some revenue from future FCC sales to those projects. GOP leaders have been pushing to reserve that money entirely as an offset for tax cuts initially enacted during the first Trump administration (see 2502190068). Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz of Texas and other Republicans are emphasizing auction proceeds as a reconciliation funding source after repeatedly opposing several spectrum packages during the last Congress that used the potential money to pay for a range of telecom projects (see 2308100058).

Emergency 911 networks appear largely to have withstood the powerful Hurricane Helene, officials said Friday. Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane Thursday at 11 p.m. in Taylor County, part of Florida’s Big Bend region, with maximum sustained winds of 140 miles per hour, the office of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Friday. After preparing for the massive storm (see 2409250048), telecom companies reported some damage to network infrastructure and said they are responding to problems that flooding and power outages caused.

The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials and National Emergency Number Association want Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, GOP nominee ex-President Donald Trump and their running mates to make support for funding next-generation 911 tech upgrades “a central tenet” of their campaign platforms. Talks between lawmakers aimed at reaching a deal on a spectrum legislative package that would fund NG-911 and other telecom projects remain stalled (see 2408150039). “Enactment of NG9-1-1 funding legislation will provide the more than 100,000 9-1-1 professionals across the country with improved situational awareness, resulting in a faster and more efficient response for the members of the public they protect,” NENA CEO Brian Fontes and APCO CEO Mel Maier said in letters to Harris, Trump, GOP vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D). “NG9-1-1 will begin saving lives the moment it is implemented. Achieving NG9-1-1 is also a national security imperative, as it will lead to enhanced response to natural and man-made disasters, protection against cyberattacks including state-sponsored attacks, and support for homeland defense efforts in the event of a national emergency.”

The government should classify public safety telecommunicators (PSTs) and dispatchers as in a protective service occupation, “the same as police officers and other public safety professionals,” and avoid putting PSTs in the same occupational classification as secretaries and office clerks, the National Emergency Number Association said in comments filed Monday with the Office of Management and Budget. NENA said the job of dispatchers has changed markedly in the past 50 years. “Unlike commercial dispatchers, PSTs have constant direct contact with callers experiencing stressful and even traumatic events,” the group said in docket BLS-2024-001. “It is not uncommon for PSTs to hear an officer’s screams ... to hear the shot when a caller commits suicide, or to calm a frantic mother while coaching her to stop the massive bleeding of an injured child,” NENA said: “These frequent traumatic contacts require a different skill set, a different mindset, and a fundamentally different stress management regime than that required to dispatch commercial transportation vehicles.”

Don't expect big changes in the next-generation 911 draft order that's set for a vote during the FCC commissioners' open meeting Thursday, a 10th-floor official tells us. While the order should help facilitate the NG911 transition, a quicker route would come if Congress found the roughly $15 billion that states and localities likely need for deployment, said Jonathan Gilad, National Emergency Number Association (NENA) government affairs director. Minus federal funding, "it will always be a haves and have-nots situation," with some localities and states more financially able than others to afford the transition, he said. The FCC said the order is aimed at accelerating the NG911 rollout (see 2406270068).

The House Education and Workforce Committee advanced an amended version of the Supporting Accurate Views of Emergency Services (911 Saves) Act (HR-6319), drawing criticism from the National Emergency Number Association and APCO. HR-6319 and the similar Enhancing First Response Act (S-3556) would reclassify public safety call takers and dispatchers as a protective service. A substitute amendment from Rep. Lori Chavez-Deremer, R-Ore., requires the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics “consider establishing a separate code for public safety telecommunicators as a subset of protective service occupations” instead of mandating the reclassification. House Education also approved by voice vote an amendment from ranking member David Scott, D-Va., to extend the timeline for BLS to report back on considering the reclassification from 30 days to 60. NENA and APCO are “disappointed that this version of [HR-6319] strays from the language of previous iterations” by not mandating the proposed reclassification, the groups said in a joint statement. They “commend the comments from [House Education] members expressing support for 9-1-1 professionals' service to our communities. We look forward to working with” lawmakers “to ensure that 9-1-1 professionals are recognized for the highly skilled, specialized, life-saving work they do every day.”

The National Emergency Number Association told the FCC its members have been overwhelmed by the number of notifications they are receiving under new reporting rules (see 2401250015). NENA representatives met with staff from the Public Safety Bureau, said a filing posted Monday in docket 18-89. “The volume of notifications makes the notification process unhelpful … as there are too many notifications" for public safety answering points "to make meaningful operational decisions for notifications that may or may not apply to them,” NENA said: “Notifications may cover all PSAPs for a very large area, such as multiple states, without geospatial or other information to communicate the exact scope of the notification or whether the PSAP should act on it.”

The FCC "has already begun investigating the 911 multistate outages that occurred [Wednesday] night to get to the bottom of the cause and impact," Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement Thursday. Authorities in affected states are asking questions, too. At least four states -- Texas, Nebraska, Nevada and South Dakota -- experienced 911 calling problems, said state officials and news reports.