Lisa Schlottach, manager of the county’s dispatching center, serves as president of the Missouri 911 Directors Association and provides a unique insight into a statewide effort to bring life-saving telecommunication technology to all Missourians. Gasconade County residents are fortunate, Schlottach notes, to have services in place which provide dispatchers information on your latitude and longitude if you place an emergency call via cell phone or from a land line. Residents in Maries and Montgomery counties do not have these services.
Missouri House Speaker Steven Tilley, R-Perryville, this week created the Interim Committee on 911 Access to find ways to bring uniformity to what some have called a patchwork of systems.
“Technology has improved at a rapid pace but the systems our municipalities use to provide emergency services have not kept up with the advances,” said Tilley. “One of the biggest issues we see is that our 911 call centers are funded by a surcharge on land lines but the majority of users have moved away from land lines to cell phones. The result is a lack of funding that has prevented call centers from upgrading equipment to provide a reliable system that is compatible with current technology.”
This effort is being embraced by the group Schlottach leads.
“We are very excited about this,” said Schlottach. “The Missouri 911 Directors Association is very involved in this movement. Our vision for Missouri to be Phase II state is getting closer. This would mean that, no matter where you are in Missouri, if you dial 911 from a wireless phone, the 911 center will have the technology to receive the data that includes the latitude and longitude of that device.”
Schlottach credited the county’s E-911 Board of Directors “for building and maintaining this life-saving technology. We use this technology on a daily basis from wireless callers —anything from a miss-dial to a domestic in progress where the victim dials 911 and cannot give their location. Unfortunately there are still over 30 counties in Missouri that do not have this capability and 16 of those counties don’t even have enhanced 911, meaning they cannot even locate you when calling on a land line phone.”
Keeping up with the technology is the new challenge, Schlottach says.
“With new technology quickly approaching, it is unfortunate that most Missouri 911 centers, including Gasconade County 911, are not financially prepared for it,” she said. “The ADA is already putting in the works a requirement for 911 centers across the country to have the ability to accept text messages and calls over the internet to the 911 center. This would require a whole new 911 system that is IP based.”
Costs to upgrade the county’s 911 equipment are estimated at more than $100,000 and would likely be paid for with borrowed funds, Schlottach said. “Although we have enough to operate, we do not have the extra funds for this type of upgrade,” she said. “Our current equipment is only 5-years-old. We just found out a week ago that it is being discontinued and no longer serviced. This means we will soon be forced to upgrade our system.
Missouri is the only state that has not passed a wireless 911 funding mechanism, Schlottach and Tilley both noted. Schlottach’s state dispatching group is helping draft legislation to provide this new funding mechanism. Under the proposal, fees for wireless users would fund 911 improvements. Those using land lines would likely see a reduction in fees they currently pay to support 911 services across the state (see save911.org for additional information).