FEE FORWARDING

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Winter 2009 by Breidenbach, Michelle

While the state raids the cell phone fund, the local governments that run 911 centers turn to property taxpayers to pay the bills.

About 50 cents of the $1.20 goes straight into the state's general fund to be spent on anything. Twenty cents pays for the Statewide Wireless Network, which so far does not work. Michael Balboni, the state's Homeland Security chief, was prepared to discuss the technical problems with the Statewide Wireless Network, but he had little to say about how it would be financed or how else the state had been spending the money.

Congress has started to punish states that divert their 911 cell phone collections. In the future, they will not be eligible for federal grants.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office surveyed the states most recently in 2006 and found that nearly all states require the wireless carriers to collect surcharges to cover the costs of implementing a wireless 91 1 service. Some admitted that they were moving the money into the general fund to help balance their state budgets. (New York did not respond.lThe GAO report (GAO-06-338), which includes a state-by-state chart, is available online at www.gao.gov/new.items/d06338.pdf.

The National Emergency Number Association has more recent information, including a chart that shows the fee in each state, at www.nena.org.

Work on presentation

When it came time to organize a story, I had to make choices. I had information on the state buying snowshoes with the cell phone fee, buying a statewide wireless system that didn't work and charging local taxpayers more than once for new 91 1 equipment. Almost $1 million went to a small-town steak and seafood restaurant and two hotels on Lake Ontario for National Guard soldiers on patrol around the state's privately owned nuclear power plants, a mission that ended under a new governor.

This small but abused tax seemed to have all of the elements of a civics lesson in the way New York often does business.

Projects editor John Lammers and I worked with the newspaper's artists to design a presentation that we thought would help readers into a story about fees and government bonds and wireless emergency communication technology.

I wrote, "The fee may have started out as a well-meaning temporary tax. But in typical New York state government style, the fee continues to pump into a 91 1 fund that is raided, borrowed against, increased and perpetuated after its job is done."

Readers were outraged.

Confidential letters came in from 91 1 coordinators around the state who were hesitant to criticize the state government they are lobbying for help.

One said, "We struggle daily with the changing technology required to perform our 91 1 mission, especially in the less populated counties ... where funding is scarce. It certainly would be a great advantage to the general public to have this funding directed to the people actually doing the work and paying the bills. Again, thank you for your efforts, you have become the unsung hero of us in the field."

Another wrote, "It is discouraging, but hopefully this article will raise a few eyebrows and the public will begin to challenge the state raiding these funds for using it for everything but what the monies were designated for."