No one likes to pay more for a government service. But a fee added to your landline and cell phone bills to fund 911 and Enhanced 911 emergency phone systems is money well spent — lifesaving money, truly.
That’s true even though that fee will change on July 1 as a new Indiana law comes calling.
Effective that date, the state assumes control of collecting and disbursing funds to Indiana counties for their emergency phone dispatching systems. That is the product of a detailed bill that passed both houses of the Indiana General Assembly by wide margins earlier this year. The law deals with two problems.
First, as our company’s Indiana statehouse reporter Maureen Hayden writes in today’s Tribune-Star, the fees charged by counties have been all over the board — from a county charging 32 cents per user a month to one at $3 per user a month.
The new law will equalize that amount, county to county. For some counties, the monthly fee will rise, but for some, it will decline.
Second, lots of phone users have dropped landlines amid the onslaught of the cell phone as the device of choice. In 20 years, as Hayden reports, the number of U.S. cell phone subscribers has risen 55-fold — from 5.2 million in 1990 to 286 million in 2010. And within those numbers, millions of Americans — and thousands of Hoosiers — have no traditional home phone.
That shift away from landlines to cell phones has cut revenue to emergency phone systems that take urgent calls for police, fire, ambulance and emergency management help — calls that report a wreck, a blaze, a heart attack, a flood.
If you have a cell phone contract, your monthly fee is to rise from 50 cents to 90 cents. If you have a prepaid cell, the fee will double from 25 cents to 50 cents each time you add minutes. Even for those of the most modest means, another 25 or 40 cents per months seems reasonable.
Earlier this year, the Indiana Association of Counties estimated that, statewide, about $20 million worth of 911 funds have been lost in the last five years because of the changing dynamic of funding from phone surcharges. The new law is an attempt to stabilize that through 2015. Then, the state will take a fresh look to see what else might need to be done. In the meantime, the fee changes for cell phones and landlines are forecast to add some $63 million in revenue for emergency phone services.
If your family has never needed 911 service — either here or in another community — then you are a lucky one. Those who have called 911 and received rapid response from trained emergency crews know its lifesaving, caregiving, rescuing benefits. Those benefits are surely worth a few cents or even a couple of dollars more a month.
Opinion
EDITORIAL: Reasonable shift for 911 fee
New law puts funds collection in balance
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