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Committee looks for improvement in 9-1-1 system

WBFO News photo by Eileen Buckley

If you need emergency help and call 9-1-1 on your cell phone, you have an 80 percent chance of the emergency system accurately figuring out where you are.  At their hearing Thursday, members of the Erie County Legislature Public Safety Committee discussed how to improve the situation.

There were a lot of explanations, from software incompatibility inside the county's 9-1-1 system to quality differences among different cell phone providers to explain that 80 percent accuracy.

There's also the issue that phone owners are paying millions of dollars in surcharges for improvements, money that is funneled to the state and gets lost.

Committee Chair Ed Rath said Albany actually spending the surcharge tax revenue on E-9-1-1 would make a difference.
      
"I would say it's tens of millions of dollars over a five year period or so. And, with that tens of millions of dollars we can continue to make the investments we need to make in our E-911 system.," Rath said.

"Because, 80 percent efficient, as I said earlier, that's an average score wherever you go and we don't want average scores when it comes to protecting the health and the well being of our residents."

There's a separate county surcharge and Central Police Services Commissioner John Glascott said that brings in more than $two million a year and it's all spent on the emergency system. He said there are dead spots in some areas of the county and there can be problems in locating people inside buildings with a lot of structural steel.
 

Mike Desmond is one of Western New York’s most experienced reporters, having spent nearly a half-century covering the region for newspapers, television stations and public radio. He has been with WBFO and its predecessor, WNED-AM, since 1988. As a reporter for WBFO, he has covered literally thousands of stories involving education, science, business, the environment and many other issues. Mike has been a long-time theater reviewer for a variety of publications and was formerly a part-time reporter for The New York Times.