Even With E-911 Rollout, Universal Coverage an Elusive Goal

"This has been pretty high on my list" since becoming sheriff two years ago, said Cedar County's James McCrary. The rural county in southwest Missouri lacks E-911 "basically because we're poor," he said. "It comes down to money." He said the county has talked to a vendor, is looking at grants or other funding options and hopes to be able to get such service within the next two years. He said he also might discuss a county 911 tax with county commissioners -- something many other Missouri counties have. He said estimates are that implementing the upgrades for the county would cost $200,000 to $300,000 upfront -- a big nut for a department with a $2 million annual budget.

National Emergency Number Association CEO Brian Fontes said there will be incremental increases as universal coverage gets closer. It never will reach 100 percent given topology and terrain issues, plus sparsely populated parts of some states like Nevada, he added.

"Not having E-911 might have worked just fine a decade or two ago" but that's no longer true in an increasingly mobile world, said Evelyn Bailey, National Association of State 911 Administrators (NASNA) executive director. She said she's guardedly optimistic that within the next decade, the "slow and steady progress" of E-911 implementation or NG-911 rollout will eliminate those pockets.

About 97.1 percent of U.S. counties and 98.8 percent of the U.S. population are under E-911 Phase II, meaning wireless carriers providing latitude and longitude information of calls to public safety answering points (PSAPs), plus callback capabilities, said Fontes. But there are parts of western states with "more jackrabbits ... than humans" and occasional small rural counties in eastern states without Phase II, typically because localities don't want to or can't afford to make that kind of investment, he said. "It takes leadership," he said. NENA said E-911 deployment mapping, the pockets and scattered communities that lack it range from some scattered counties in Georgia to a peppering of counties in Missouri and from much of the Oklahoma panhandle to a sizable spread of Nevada.

'Precious Time'

Bailey said Illinois has "made really good progress" in filling in the holes since it instituted a statewide program. Without a state authority even attempting something similar, "nothing is happening" in Nevada, she said. Missouri has a statewide 911 program but with limited authority -- something now being tackled, Bailey said.

The Nevada Department of Public Safety emailed us it's working with state leaders on how to proceed there. The Missouri DPS emailed that 911 "is a locally controlled issue." It said fewer dollars were collected from landlines as consumers moved to mobile phones. It said a new state 911 law that took effect earlier this year provided for fee collection on prepaid wireless devices, with that money going to the state 911 trust fund specifically for E-911.

Shannon County, Missouri, "would love to have" an E-911 system, since response time "is the biggest factor we fight," emailed Sheriff Darrin Brawley. A 911 call from a mobile phone made on the outskirts of the county south of Mark Twain National Forest typically gets transferred to the closest 911 center in a neighboring county, and then gets routed to Shannon County's dispatch office with contact information and the county then has to call the caller back, he said. "That takes up precious time in an emergency." Estimated cost of an E-911 implementation is $900,000, triple the Sheriff's Department annual budget, he said. He said estimates for a 0.5 cent sales tax for 911 service also indicated that would be insufficient, and grant assistance for installing a system would still leave the county unable to afford later upgrades, he said.

Illinois has gone from 13 counties without E-911 in 2016 to four today, with two in the process of consolidating with a third county to have that service provided, the Statewide 911 Advisory Board reported last month. Illinois Statewide 911 Administrator Cindy Barbera-Brelle told us the impetus came from a 2015 law that included a priority to serve unserved counties and set due dates, plus state funding for one-time expenses. She said of the two counties still unserved, "we have just struggled" to find a suitable system or county for them to partner with.

Costs and Benefits

There's no empirical data on the value of rolling out E-911, since no one consistently measures time of dispatch to time of arrival, Fontes said. Inevitably, ability to call back or triangulate is going to lead to improved responses, he said. Having an address or cell sector instead of just a cell tower "is a definite improvement," he said.

Price tags can be substantial due to system complexity. E-911's tying of a phone number to an address is "not an insignificant undertaking," said Joe Blaschka, principal engineer with public safety communications engineering and consulting firm Adcomm. Costs can include establishing and maintaining the master street guide database of phone numbers and associated location information and who's assigned to that number, he said. There also are ongoing costs for 911 trunk lines, he said. A PSAP's equipment costs for E-911 can run $50,000 per operating position, he said. Some rural counties have opted to contract services with a larger county, though giving up local control "is a hard pill sometimes for counties to swallow," he said.

As states move to NG-911 statewide or regional systems, that might eliminate the need for E-911 in counties without, NENA's Fontes said.

Illinois' Barbera-Brelle said state legislators set a July 1, 2020, deadline for a statewide NG-911 system to be up and operational. However, she said, "as much as we've made progress ... a system of that magnitude takes a while." The state received proposals April 2 and is evaluating them, she said. She said some regional pieces are in place, and the state might move to transition everyone else over time. She said there have been discussions about the two remaining counties without E-911 just holding off for that statewide NG-911 system. "Why spend good money when it's going to be a short-term investment?"

NASNA's Bailey said issues that hampered E-911 will be present with NG-911 rollouts "for the exact same reasons -- lack of authority, lack of mandate for statewide coverage." Implementation of NG-911 will be substantially more complicated than E-911, and will almost surely require a geographic information system as well, Blaschka said. He said there likely will be more dispatch consolidations with NG-911 because of those GIS expenses driving smaller counties to band together.