JACKSON, Miss. — A proposed bill in the Mississippi Senate would redistribute funds from cell phone companies to 911 systems throughout the state to help pay for equipment upgrades.
Miss. State Senate Bill 2577 would divert additional funds from a $1 surcharge on cell phone bills to county authorities to use for maintaining 911 centers, WCBI reports.
Computers in the Lee County 911 operations center in Saltillo, for instance, are seven years old and present problems for dispatchers, said director Paul Harkins. The system is obsolete, and equipment and technology upgrades are necessary and expensive, he said.
“Seventy cents out of that one dollar comes back to the 911 centers, and 30 percent goes into a fund for cost recovery for the cellular providers,” Harkins said.
The legislation would redistribute 100 percent of the surcharge to 911 centers.
“Over 90 percent of our 911 call volume is from wireless callers,” he said. “So location technology is important; determining whether one incident is the same as another incident, when they are close in geographical areas.”