911 board could deficit spend under new law

FRUSTRATING

I understand my budget, we all do as department heads. So it's frustrating to know we’re being penalized for being good stewards. And again this isn’t tax money, it’s surcharge money and there’s a huge difference there.”

Tony Keefe, LeeComm Director

LEE COUNTY – LeeComm Director Tony Keefe updated Lee County Supervisors Tuesday with some real figures on how much money will be drawn back from his budget to fund statewide 911 efforts under new legislation passed this year.
Keefe had approached the board earlier this year with a warning that Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency would be withholding a portion of their funding from the $1 surcharge cellphone users pay with their monthly bill, to offset shortages at the state level.
On Tuesday, Keefe said that figure will represent about 10% of LeeComm’s annual funding.
“A couple months ago, I came to the board and kind of gave a warning that the state was going to take some E911 money,” he said.
“I got the bill of what that's gonna cost us per year and they're gonna charge us by quarter. So this fiscal year they're gonna take $29,327.18 of our allotment that comes through on your local 911 bill that you pay for your cell phone.”
That amounts to just under 10% of the projected surcharge revenues that come from the state of about $312,000 annually, he said.
The Lee County 911 Service Board has about a million dollars in a reserve fund, and most counties in the state 911 boards have reserves put aside for future upkeep and maintenance. Keefe said Polk County has about $12 million in reserves and that’s where the state saw options for balancing their budget.
He said the board will be responsible for upgrading the service Motorola has put in. He said the county isn’t “mandated’  to upgrade with Motorola, but if they don’t, they will be “left in the dust”.
He said each RF tower site will cost $550,000 to upgrade and they have four of them. The county also has other upgrades, including two prime sites and four dispatch consoles, and the math shows about $3.56 million that they will have to come up with by 2032 to upgrade their four-year-old radios.
Those upgrades are statewide for any 911 board on the state system.
“This is why we save money and are fiscally responsible with our money,” he said.
He said there are payment options and financing available through Motorola which could help things in the long-term, but now LeeComm will be operating in the red rather than being able to put back some net revenues to help pay for infrastructure and upkeep in the future.
The one million dollars the board has in reserve is invested, but Keefe said he’s unsure if the return on that is sufficient to cover the fees IHSEMA would charge under the new law.
Keefe also said it may be time to add a tower in the county to allow for redundancies. He said portable radios do not have guaranteed coverage, and Motorola’s contract with the county calls for 98% guaranteed mobile coverage, which is the radios in the cars and not handhelds.
“The system does not utilize repeaters from portable radios back to the car radios, so when first responders get out of the vehicle, they have no coverage on their portable radios,” Keefe wrote in a follow-up to Pen City Current Tuesday.
He said a recent lightning strike on the tower on Hilton Road knocked out all redundancies in place in that coverage area, including the Keokuk area.
Keefe also said the coverage deficiencies in south Lee County could require an additional tower in the county to help with redundancies for when towers are hit by lightning. During those outages, Keokuk and other deputies in the south part of the county didn’t have radio coverage back to LeeComm and he said deputies and other emergency personnel don’t have coverage in the Croton area.
“That’s a big problem. We talked about maybe adding another tower site and another tower’s going to be $1.2 to $1.3 million,” Keefe said. “These are some big bills coming.”
He said LeeComm has been good with saving money and it wasn’t properly articulated to IHSEMA, and had they done a better job locally of communicating, they may have had a bigger presence in Des Moines, possibly.
“It is what it is. I wanted to put the board on notice and I’m sorry I keep coming to the board with bad news,” he said.
Supervisor Garry Seyb asked if the state was looking at an annual shortfall and Keefe said that was the case.
“So their budgeting it coming down to the county’s or the boards and taking their money and making them budget,” Seyb said.
Keefe said that’s his assumption, but Seyb should check with local legislators for confirmation.
Keefe also said there are two 911 data centers in Iowa that get all the 911 calls before getting sent back to local PSAPs. Those are being moved and the local boards are now funding those relocations.
“I understand my budget, we all do as department heads. So it's frustrating to know we’re being penalized for being good stewards. And again, this isn’t tax money, it’s surcharge money, and there’s a huge difference there.”