At a Wednesday meeting in Sacramento, public safety officials serving on the State 911 Advisory Board questioned why they were kept in the dark about safety issues impacting California’s massive Next Generation 911 project.
The agency responsible for the project, the California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) also announced it has stopped all deployment of the new network until it figures out the scope of the problems uncovered by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit.
The advisory board said it has scheduled a special meeting to get to the bottom of their concerns.
“If this board was misled in any way, whether intentionally or by negligence or by poor communication, that needs to come to light,” said Martinez Police Chief Andrew White, who took over as the advisory board’s chair at the meeting.
As NBC Bay Area reported last week, the state’s half-billion-dollar project to bring its landline-based emergency 911 network into the internet age has been plagued by years of delays, along with complaints from dispatchers that lost calls, outages and other failures are jeopardizing public safety.
The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services recently cut ties with Budge Currier, the man in charge of implementing the state’s NG911 vision. Currier, until his departure, had also chaired the 911 advisory board.
Board members, however, say they were never told Currier was no longer with Cal OES, nor were they informed of troubling issues encountered by some of the first dispatchers in the state to use the NG911 network, in places such as Tuolumne County and Desert Hot Springs.
“There was information that came out that certainly, as an advisory board member, that I hadn’t been aware of,” White said.
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Other board members echoed White’s concerns.
“Speaking for myself, it caused me to go back and communicate with some of our dispatch centers,” Rodeo-Hercules Fire Protection Bureau Chief Rebecca Ramirez said. “I feel like there hasn’t been enough information on the totality of the system and how it’s working.”
Cal OES officials said they hoped to have answers for the board members at the special meeting scheduled for February, although they had no estimate on when the long-overdue project might be completed.
Cal OES originally estimated the network would be live across the entire state by 2021. Three years later, however, only 22 of California’s 438 emergency dispatch centers are currently taking calls on the NG911 system.
Board members questioned how the state was holding the contractors in charge of building the NG911 accountable for their performance.
An attorney for Cal OES said the agency can draft a letter to the appropriate vendor if it’s deemed there was a violation in their contract or agreement but did not elaborate further. He said the state is also working on a new audit process for vendors.
NGA, one of the four contractors working on the network, had a representative at the meeting who said the company was actively working with Cal OES to resolve any issues. NBC Bay Area reached out to the other three companies, but they haven’t yet responded.
At the meeting, Cal OES officials also conceded that not every failure with the NG911 system gets publicly reported.
When asked by NBC Bay Area why an outage in Tuolumne in Tuolumne County that lasted 12 hours in 2022 was never brought up at subsequent advisory board meetings, Cal OES’ attorney said they hope to address such concerns at the next meeting.
NGA is building the network in Tuolumne and said it couldn’t comment on specific outages. But in an email, the company said, “many of these challenges are tied to the legacy infrastructure being phased out as part of the NG-9-1-1 migration."
While board members demanded more transparency and had tough questions for Cal OES officials, they continue to express unwavering support for modernizing California’s aging 911 system.
“California needs NG 911,” said board member Mark Chase on behalf of the California Chapter of the National Emergency Number Association (CALNENA). “CALNENA encourages the Cal OES 9-1-1 branch to reset realistic expectations and timelines, commit to transparency, and engage us as willing partners. We stand ready to help.”
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If you have a question or comment about this report, email candice.nguyen@nbcuni.com.
