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Are you innocent or guilty? 911 call may tell
James 'Bob' Ward, John Tabbutt both called 911, but demeanors differed, authorities say
 
The frantic first call for help can be a detective's best clue.

In the case of James Robert Ward, his 911 call helped land him in jail.

"I just shot my wife ... she's dead," Ward told dispatchers in his Sept.21, 7:50p.m. call for help. He was polite and calm.

Hours later, a detective overheard Ward say his wife, Diane, killed herself and he needed a criminal lawyer. Bob Ward was arrested that night, thanks in part to his call to dispatchers.

A 911 call can make the difference between a closed case and a cold one, said Tracy Harpster, a Moraine, Ohio, police lieutenant and co-author of a study of emergency calls released this year.

"It is vital. Sometimes, it's the only statement a guilty person ever makes," Harpster said.

Ward pleaded not guilty to a second-degree-murder charge and is out on bond as the case develops.

It's second nature to hunt for clues in a 911 call. All of them are recorded.

During an investigation into toddler Caylee Marie Anthony's 2008 death, detectives and amateur sleuths alike said mother Casey Anthony raised their suspicions because she was calm when she told a dispatcher her daughter had been missing for 31 days. She is in the Orange County Jail awaiting trial on a first-degree-murder charge.

On Friday, John Tabbutt shot and killed Nancy Dinsmore in their Winter Springs home a day before they were to be married. During his emergency call to dispatchers, Tabbutt wailed, sobbed and asked that an ambulance be sent right away.

Winter Springs police said the shooting was accidental, saying Tabbutt was "very, very distraught." He has not been arrested.

For decades, researchers have tested whether detectives' gut feelings can be backed by evidence. They study speech patterns and other characteristics of witness statements, and some think what callers say can be as important as how they say it.

But calling someone a liar because he uses an odd tone of voice is risky.

"Different people react and respond to tragedy or stressful situations in different ways," said Tod Burke, a professor of criminal justice at Radford (Va.) University.

This is why James "Bob" Ward's lawyer Kirk Kirkconnell thinks investigators and the media are making too much out of his client's 911 call, he said.

The suspicions, Kirkconnell said, are "extremely speculative."

Still, some experts say a caller doesn't have to confess to a crime — or even give statements that conflict with his alibi — for his 911 call to be useful to detectives.

In a paper published in the February issue of the academic journal Homicide Studies, Harpster and co-authors Susan Adams and John Jarvis, both of the FBI, analyzed 100 emergency calls. They found detectives can use a checklist of 20 factors to tally whether a caller deserves more scrutiny.

Harpster would not discuss specifics, saying that doing so might aid killers. But this study and others show tone of voice, concern for the victim and word repetition can be important.

These factors aren't enough to convict a killer, but they can tell investigators whom to scrutinize.

"An innocent person says different things than a guilty one," Harpster said.

Locally, Orange County sheriff's dispatchers typically e-mail a 911-call audio file to homicide investigators as soon as possible — often while they're still poring over a fresh crime scene, homicide investigator Cpl. Duwana Pelton said.

"People will say things in the heat of the moment that they planned to cover up," Pelton said.

The audio of Bob Ward's 911 call has not been released publicly by investigators. A transcript of it was entered into evidence in the criminal case against him.

Pelton said when Bob Ward reported his wife's shooting to police, he was unusually calm and polite.

He assured a dispatcher that deputies would not encounter problems when they arrived at his Isleworth home. He gave the location of a gun used in the shooting and offered to meet deputy sheriffs at his front door. He told dispatchers repeatedly that he shot his wife. He also said it was an accident.

Alone, these actions prove little. But they were enough to prompt investigators to give Ward a close look.

"When you get someone [who is] matter-of-fact and you don't hear them in an excited state," Pelton said, "it makes [you] wonder."

New Law Enhances 911 for the Disabled

JACKSON COUNTY-- We know time matters in emergency situations. So does knowledge.

A new Illinois ensures that families can share information about loved ones with disabilities with their local 911 call center.

That means when crews go out to the scene of an emergency they'll be better prepared to deal with patients with disabilities.

"We're an information society today, we actually react better with the more information that we have," said Jackson County 911 Director Patrick Lustig.

When dispatchers receive calls information about a location appears on a computer screen. If someone associated with that location has a disability, dispatchers know about it immediately. They relay that information to first responders.

That information is meant to help police, firefighters and paramedics assist patients with special needs.

"If a first responder is going to the home or encountering a person with a disability he or she has some idea what to expect," said Anthony Cuvo, director of the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

Cuvo and his colleagues have been training first responders for dealing with autistic patients.

"How to interact with them, how to communicate with them,” said family services coordinator Sherell Sparks. “Each person is different and it may take a different type of technique to interact with them."

So if the right information appears on dispatchers’ screens, the most helpful information will go out.

Contact your local 911 center directly to let them know about a disability in your family.

The heart of the matter
Why surviving cardiac arrest in Canada is so difficult
by Katie Engelhart on Thursday, September 10, 2009

Think you’re at risk for cardiac arrest? Consider a move to Vancouver. Or, if you can swing it, aim to settle in Seattle. Canada’s national survival rate for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests is less than comforting: under five per cent, says the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada (HSF). But while the risk of cardiac arrest is the same across the country, the likelihood of survival is not.

When someone in Toronto has a cardiac arrest outside the hospital and receives emergency medical services treatment, the chance he will live to tell the tale is 5.5 per cent, according to a report published by the American Medical Association. But if the same person lives in Vancouver, his likelihood of living is nearly twice as high: 9.7 per cent. And he’d be better off yet if he lived in the cardiac champion of cities: Seattle, which reigns over North America at 16.3 per cent. These regional variations expose a host of deficiencies in Canada’s approach to cardiac arrest, the nation’s leading cause of death. What is surprising is, many of the failures come in to play not in the ambulance or the ER—but on the street, before paramedics even arrive.

So why aren’t we all performing at the level of Vancouver or Seattle? If you ask Dr. Laurie Morrison, emergency medicine specialist at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, where the biggest gap in cardiac arrest response lies, she’ll be quick to name the culprit: CPR, or rather the lack of it. The truth, says Morrison, is that cardiac arrest is different from other major killers. “With cancer, you’ve got to make sure that we have all these diagnostic devices and that people have access to resources. Whereas, with cardiac arrest, simple things can make a 100-fold difference.”

For starters, basic CPR—involving cycles of chest compressions and breaths—can boost survival rates by 400 per cent. But “Canadians, for some reason, do not get down on their hands and knees and do CPR. It’s the most pathetic thing,” Morrison charges. The chance that a bystander in Canada knows and will perform CPR is around 15 per cent, according to an Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI) study. That’s “miserable,” says Linda Piazza, an HSF researcher, adding: “We have one of the worst responder rates in the Western world.” Those figures are even worse when the cardiac arrest happens at home—as 80 per cent do—and family members are too paralyzed by fear to act.

Morrison speculates that Canadians’ quintessential prudence could be at fault. “I don’t know whether it’s a Canadian cultural thing,” she muses. “Like, ‘I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want to interfere.’ ” That may be true, but it does not explain why survival rates vary so much by region, even within Canada. Edmonton’s bystander CPR rate, for instance, is fairly high: around 46 per cent. Of course, factors outside the scope of cardiac science—from city layout, which impacts ambulance response times, to the way cities collect EMS data—can skew the numbers.

But a crucial determinant is know-how—Seattle’s first leg up. Many of us wouldn’t have the first idea of how to resuscitate someone. “When you live in Seattle, it’s expected that you should know CPR,” explains Dr. Christian Vaillancourt, clinical epidemiologist at OHRI. Vaillancourt estimates that Seattle has the world’s highest bystander CPR rate—possibly with the exception of Oslo. But Seattle’s CPR-friendly culture did not spontaneously take root. It is largely the fruit of an aggressive municipal scheme. Since 1971, Seattle firefighters have trained over 771,000 locals in CPR. The training takes just three hours. Morrison says there are no Canadian programs on that scale—though Vancouver, say, does a better job training citizens.

Canada also falls short when it comes to teaching people how to use automatic external defibrillators (AEDs), Morisson says—pointing out that in Seattle, bystanders are eight times more likely to use the devices than in Toronto. That number is compelling, because a victim’s chance of pulling through falls seven to 10 per cent for every minute delay in defibrillation. “The thing that drives me to distraction” she raves, “is that we have lots of AEDs, but nobody knows where we have them.” In most cities, defibrillators do not have to be registered with local EMS providers. The result is that 911 dispatchers aren’t always able to direct bystanders to nearby devices at a time of need. Morrison says she plans to pay Toronto Mayor David Miller a visit, to ask him to mandate registration: “It doesn’t take any brains to figure that it could be helpful” there.

But prescient planning isn’t enough. Cities need more consistent protocols to help untrained bystanders when they observe a cardiac arrest. Take Ontario. Historically, says Vaillancourt, it boasted Canada’s lowest bystander CPR rate, by about 10 per cent. Part of the problem was the province wasn’t giving citizens the right emergency instruction. Today, any Canadian outside Ontario who calls 911 to report a cardiac arrest is coached by dispatchers to provide chest compressions without the breathing component, often the main deterrent among bystanders. But Ontarians only started getting dispatch assistance in 2004—years after other provinces. And Ontario remains the only province whose dispatchers instruct bystanders in mouth-to-mouth. That instruction, says Vaillancourt, takes an extra 1.5 minutes—time that patients don’t have.

At the heart of all this, says Morrison, is the simple fact that cardiac arrest research was “never a priority for our government.” Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more than the dearth of information surrounding cardiac arrests. “Most cities,” explains Dr. Ian Stiell, chair of emergency medicine research at OHRI, “can’t tell you what their bystander CPR rate is. They can’t tell you how fast they are with the defibrillator. And they can’t tell you the survival rate.” Canada does not have a national cardiac arrest database that would allow cities to compare notes and borrow methods. Stiell says he’s pushed for one, but his efforts have been met with apathy. “They wouldn’t do it. I guess it costs too much. But an awful lot of people die.”

Pre-hospital cardiac care “is like an orphan,” Stiell says; it slips through the bureaucratic cracks. Municipalities, for instance, control firefighter units, but provinces set ambulance guidelines. And while the feds direct funding, independent groups like HSF generate CPR guidelines. Morrison notes that when she’s hunting for grant money, she’s often forced to team up with specialists in other fields. Vaillancourt swears that the huge scale of cardiac arrest research trials—which often involve hundreds of patients—makes grant boards nervous, and more inclined to fund “basic science projects.” Research on “the effect of such and such a protein on muscle contractivity” sells better than a social science project trying to improve CPR rates, he argues.

Recently, though, there has been a resurgence of interest in CPR. “For a long time,” says Stiell, “we’ve [focused on] drugs and gadgets. But CPR is back.” This interest is largely fuelled by the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC), a coalition of Canadian and U.S. research teams conducting the first large-scale clinical trials in the cardiac arrest field. Part of the issue, says Stiell, is that modern CPR was designed in the 1960s. Since then, we’ve basically accepted that formula.

One city that hasn’t accepted the norm is Vancouver. Several years ago, Vancouver EMS threw standard CPR guidelines to the wind. Now, its paramedics do “continuous-compression” CPR; in other words, they don’t stop compressions for breaths. The same applies to Seattle paramedics. Stiell cautiously agrees that the departure could help explain Vancouver’s cardiac success. Indeed, a growing body of evidence suggests that interrupting the flow of blood provided by compressions reduces a patient’s chances of survival. But continuous-compression CPR has not been scientifically analyzed. That will soon change; a forthcoming ROC study will examine the role of breathing in CPR’s efficacy. (For Vancouver, to Stiell’s dismay, the evidence already available may be compelling enough; B.C. Ambulance has not decided if it will take part in the study.)

Today, the most active Canadian research sites are those involved in ROC: Toronto, Vancouver, and a group of cities under Ottawa’s leadership. Piazza admits their research is very dependent on our southern neighbour. If it weren’t for the U.S. National Institute of Health, she says, “there’s no way we would have the money to do this.” The amount dedicated to cardiac arrest research is “a drop in bucket compared to something like oncology,” adds Morrison. As a result, “there is very little resuscitation research ongoing in Canada.” In fact, for ROC’s next funding cycle, beginning in 2010, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research will actually decrease its contribution from almost $3 million to $2 million. HSF will make up the difference.

A 2008 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association claims that if all North American cities could match Seattle’s success rate, we would save 15,000 more lives a year. Most cities still trail behind, though. “I think with some diseases,” says Piazza, “everyone knows somebody who has them, whereas it’s almost hidden when somebody collapses from a cardiac arrest and is resuscitated.” Stiell agrees: “Cardiac arrest goes sort of under the radar. It’s not like a plane crash or a pandemic.” But how can the nation’s number one cause of death—a disease that affects 35,000 to 45,000 Canadians each year—be a silent killer?

Facebook used more to find missing kids
Aug 29, 2009
MICHAEL OLIVEIRA
THE CANADIAN PRESS

When 19-year-old William Hood seemingly went missing earlier this summer in Toronto and hadn't contacted anyone in his family for weeks, his mom, a police dispatcher from London, Ont., knew exactly what to do.

She went on Facebook.

Online social networking sites are increasingly being used to complement police investigations into missing person reports, and Facebook is filled with stories of families seized by unimaginable grief.

This week, Child Find Manitoba turned to Facebook to help in the search for missing children Abby and Dominic Maryk, who disappeared more than a year ago and may have been abducted by their biological father.

"Our goal is to use as many means as possible to get the faces of these children in front of as wide an audience as possible," said Christy Dzikowicz, the organization's director, in a statement.

The Missing Children Society of Canada doesn't go out of its way to recommend that Facebook be used in the search for loved ones, but often finds that going online is among the first things many families do, said spokeswoman Marilyne Aalhus.

Pages devoted to missing people are plastered across Facebook, but among the sad eulogies for loved ones who have never been found, there are some hopeful stories with happy endings.

The London dispatcher – 42-year-old Deanna Rawn – logged on to Facebook after her son William, who had moved to Toronto for school, stopped returning calls and emails.

First she sounded a warning shot, and posted a message on her profile and on his wall saying she was very worried and would be calling police if she didn't hear from him soon.

Hours passed with no reply. As she picked up the phone to call police, she also logged back on to Facebook and posted the digital equivalent of a "missing" poster.

"MISSING: (my son) William James Hood - DOB: Nov 8 1989 (19 yrs), 6'2", 125-130 lbs, slender build. Hazel eyes, brownish/dirty blonde hair, worn shaggy. Last seen July 8th 2009 in his apartment on Kane Ave in Toronto. ANYONE with information, please call me,`` read the plea from Rawn."

The message was time-stamped July 29, 4:03 p.m.

Twenty-six minutes later, her son replied.

"Hey mom. LONG story short, I'm ok. I'm not in T.O. any more. I have just been practically living under a rock in terms of technology. I don't have a phone or anything like that, but I will try to call your cell ASAP."

The teen had strayed a few hours north of the city looking for work but hadn't relayed that information back to his worried family.

"Like most teenagers, when they start out on their own they want to think they can do it all without any help from their families, and he wanted to be back on his feet before he let anyone know where he was," Rawn explained.

"With youth nowadays Facebook is an addiction for them, they all go on it, they all have friends (on it) and I figured even if he wasn't still going on it because he (didn't have Internet access), maybe one of his friends would hear where he was."

"It was a great relief that within a couple of hours of it being posted on Facebook he had contacted me."

When 38-year-old Richard Hayward of Brantford, Ont., disappeared last year without warning, his family also turned to Facebook, and pleaded with his friends and acquaintances for any information about what happened to him.

Days, weeks and months passed with no news, just expressions of sadness and support from well-wishers.

Then one day, about eight months after the first plea for information was posted by Hayward's sister, good news emerged about Hayward getting back in touch.

But for every happy story about reunited families, Facebook is many more sad memorials for missing people who have never been found.

Twenty-one-year-old Dylan Koshman of Edmonton has been missing since Oct. 10th, 2008, but his family and friends have not given up hope and continue to gather on Facebook to exchange messages of support and wait for news.

Koshman left his apartment after an argument with a roommate and has not been seen since. Although the site has contributed few solid leads, Koshman's family credits Facebook with helping to quickly let people know about his disappearance.

"Facebook was definitely a great tool to have it connect us with all our friends and family immediately," said Koshman's sister, Tara.

"We set up a page almost immediately to try to get the word out, it was a utility for friends and family to go and see what we were doing, where they could join if they wanted to volunteer and what was going on."

Still, there are drawbacks to posting appeals for help on Facebook, as the family of murdered eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford of Woodstock, Ont., learned.

The site was great for spreading the word about her disappearance and co-ordinating public searches, but it also became a forum for unsubstantiated rumour-mongering and slandering of the girl's parents as the police investigation dragged on.

"It definitely helped to raise awareness but there's definitely pros and cons with it," said Rebecca Stafford, the girl's aunt who started the Facebook page.

"You had people that were venting their anger about the situation there and you almost had a pack mentality forming ... sometimes we were worried that there might be some form of lynch mob forming or something to that effect."

Despite the potential drawbacks, Koshman said she'll continue to use Facebook in the search for her brother until her family finally gets closure. Since Koshman's body has never been found, the family is still hoping for a miracle.

"It definitely keeps our hopes alive that he might be out there, maybe he had some amnesia or something; and if he is gone, at least we can find him," she said.

"It's good to get his picture out there, hopefully somebody out there will be able to recognize him."

       
Underfunded, uneven: Florida's 911 system
By Joe Ruble

September 1, 2009

A first-of-its-kind study of a state's 911 emergency response system finds that Florida's is underfunded at the state level, uneven at the local levels and not really a system at all.
"Each county is responsible for their own 911 system and so you have to have the right technology to pass things off," said Mark Pritchett with the Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice.
Instead, Florida has a patchwork of 67 different 911 systems in place.

The study was prompted by the abduction, rape and murder of Denise Amber Lee from her Sarasota-area home last year. Despite calling 911 from her abductor's cellphone, police closest to her were not made aware. Michael Lee King was convicted and is being sentenced Tuesday.

The foundation funded a study that found "a system that falls short in fundamental aspects of any public service: the ability to measure the success of outcomes, the dedication of sufficient resources, and the provisions of an equal level of service to every citizen."
Pritchett, a former aide to Governor Charlie Crist, is calling for someone to be appointed at the state level to monitor how effectively call for emergency assistance are handled.
The study also concluded that the 258 call centers around Florida "do not necessarily employ industry best practices and standards," leaving Floridians with uneven levels of service.
Fundings is another issue the study takes up. 911 fees that we pay through monthly phone bills barely cover two-thirds of the cost of the service.
A state law prohibits spending on dispatch services, it noted.
"We don't have uniform hiring standards or training standards to train dispatchers. You can just hire somebody off the street to be a call taker and a dispatcher. I don't think that's the kind of system Floridians want," Pritchett said.

Swine flu vaccine trials begin at St. Louis University
Catherine Wolf, KWMU
 
ST. LOUIS, MO (KWMU) -
Clinical trials of a vaccine for swine flu began at St. Louis University Monday. The Center for Vaccine Development is one of eight U.S. sites testing dosage amounts and whether the vaccine can be given along with a yearly flu shot.
Lead investigator Dr. Sharon Frey said initial results could be available in a few weeks and a vaccine could be ready by early fall.
"The government has ordered huge amounts, hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines, and so it's a matter of how quickly the pharmaceuticals can manufacture that and get it shipped out."
Twenty-five-year-old Nicholas Sarakas said he volunteered for the study because he works with the public a lot.
"Knowing that I'm kind of in the risk category with the demographic of people who basically suffer the most from it I kind of thought maybe this would be a good idea, and figuring I'll probably end up getting the flu shot anyway."
Researchers plan tests on children and pregnant women next. Frey said they will be given priority for getting shots once a vaccine is ready.

Surcharge for public safety goes elsewhere
State puts most of 911 tax in general fund instead of using it to help find cell callers
By Stephen T. Watson
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
The Buffalo News
Updated: July 14, 2009

It’s the 911 tax in name only.

New York State imposed a 70- cent monthly surcharge on New Yorkers’ cell phone bills in 1991.

The money was supposed to go toward technology to help find people making emergency calls from their cell phones.

Instead, New York’s governors and legislators have diverted the lion’s share of that money to the operations of state agencies.

“Basically, they’re using that money as general revenue,” said Genesee County Sheriff Gary T. Maha, whose office oversees 911 operations. “We have not seen any of that money.”

The surcharge — raised in 2002 to $1.20 per month — has generated about $600 million over 15 years, but just $84 million has gone to the municipalities that operate 911 centers, the State 911 Coordinators Association found.

And a report by the state comptroller highlights millions of dollars spent on hotel rooms, meals at restaurants, office supplies and laundry service.

While state officials say that most of the revenue has supported key public safety initiatives, county emergency officials say this budgetary shift has forced local governments to bear the cost of investing in needed technology.

“It’s absurd. One only has to do a little research to see how little of the money has been spent how it was intended,” said Chautauqua County Sheriff Joseph A. Gerace.

Every county in the state now has the ability to trace most cell phone calls to within hundreds of meters of the caller, but the cell phone fee remains.

Emergency officials acknowledge that the system doesn’t handle calls perfectly; 911 calls from cell phones in this region can be picked up by a wireless tower in the wrong county, Pennsylvania or even Canada.

“It does work well in general, but with all technology, you need to know the limitations,” said John M. Merklinger, director of the Monroe County 911 center and president of the 911 Coordinators Association. “. . . With a cell phone, we’re not going to know exactly where you are.”

Valuable time may elapse before dispatchers can transfer the call. This is a concern because about 70 percent of 911 calls are made from cell phones, according to the Federal Communications Commission, plus Internet phone connections, which produce similar tracking problems.

“Seconds are critically important in emergency situations,” said Peter M. Vito, commissioner of Erie County Central Police Services.

The Niagara County emergency communications center in Lockport handles all cell phone calls made to 911 in the county. When the center receives a cell phone call, a program reveals the date, time and number of the call and the address of the cellular tower that picked it up.

Within seconds, the center can “rebid” the call to get a more precise location, said Marc E. Kasprzak, senior dispatcher for the Niagara County Sheriff’s Office.

In this case, the dispatcher sees a longitude and latitude for the caller and an accuracy reading. Depending on factors such as weather and geography, this reading can range from 10 or 20 meters to as much as 300 meters, Kasprzak said. “There are a lot of variables,” he said.

The system in Chautauqua County has been able to find boaters who call from Lake Erie, missing riders of all-terrain vehicles and victims of accidents along the Thruway. “The large majority of the calls are locatable,” Gerace said.

In Niagara County, as in other 911 centers, dispatchers can pull up a street grid to plot the call. Many counties also subscribe to imaging software that generates an aerial photograph with cross hairs over the location. One more step lays the address of the call over the photo.

Problems develop in areas along county borders. Cellular towers in Niagara County pick up calls from communities along the borders with northern Erie County, Orleans County and even Ontario.

Wireless calls from communities just inside Niagara County can be picked up by a cellular tower in the wrong jurisdiction, and other counties face similar problems.

The call transfer is done as quickly as possible, but getting the caller to the right county still takes precious seconds.

The FCC sets standards for wireless providers for accuracy in tracing 911 calls made by cell phones.

To find cell phone callers, providers rely on either global positioning system satellites — most cell phones now have GPS chips in them—or triangulation from the closest cellular towers.

Each method has its benefits and its drawbacks, but officials acknowledged there is a basic limit to network accuracy.

“It’s an imperfect system, presently,” Gerace said. “We are trying to manage a system based on private vendors that we have no control over.”

Phone calls made over an Internet or cable connection present their own set of challenges. Calls to 911 through Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, can be traced to the addresses at which subscribers register their service.

Emergency officials say they have received misdirected 911 calls made through VOIP by people who travel for business or who used to live in this area but didn’t change their address after moving.

Niagara County got a 911 call through VOIP about a baby who wasn’t breathing. “The call came up in our county, but the people actually lived in North or South Carolina,” Kasprzak said.

There are no minimum standards for accuracy in tracing VOIP calls, though the FCC is considering establishing some, said Robert Kenny, a spokesman.

Buried on your cell phone bill, the 911 surcharge was imposed to provide money for upgrades.

All of the surcharge revenue initially was sent to the State Police, which spent most of the money on items unrelated to the 911 system, according to a 2002 state comptroller’s audit.

“It makes me mad because the public thinks it’s going to 911, and it’s not,” Merklinger said.

In 2002, the state added 50 cents to the monthly surcharge and broadened the list of acceptable uses for the money, said Matt Anderson, a state Budget Division spokesman.

The state also borrowed $100 million to create a second pool of money for county 911 services, but the state uses surcharge fees to pay off the bond.

Surcharge money also goes to the general fund and to the State Police, the Department of Correctional Services and other agencies. The National Guard, for example, paid for hotel rooms, dry cleaning and meals at Denny’s and other restaurants, the comptroller’s office found.

“Our position as a company has always been that every penny collected for the enhanced 911 surcharge should be used to fund a statewide E-911 system and for nothing else,” said John O’Malley, Verizon Wireless spokesman for this region.

Over the last two years, New York spent $21.2 million from the surcharge as part of efforts to develop a statewide emergency radio network, according to the comptroller’s office.

This system failed numerous tests, and the contract was scrapped in January, said Lee Shurtleff of Tompkins County, a member of the New York State 911 Board.

Last year, the surcharge generated $175 million, and $9.8 million went to the state’s 62 counties, officials said.

The comptroller’s office could not provide a county-by-county breakdown of the surcharge revenue sent to, or back from, the state.

Genesee County has received $35,000 per year to pay for 911 operations, Maha said. Erie County gets about $500,000 per year, Vito said, adding that the county attorney is looking into whether the surcharge-distribution method can be challenged.

“Just simply doing the math, you can see the tax isn’t going where it’s supposed to,” Niagara County Sheriff James R. Voutour said.

All Western New York counties except Allegany levy a 30-cent-per-month cell phone surcharge on top of the $1.20 state fee. But for the most part, counties rely on a land-line surcharge and property taxes to cover the cost of their 911 systems.

The state has no plans to change how 911 surcharge revenue is spent.

“We believe ultimately there are a number of important public safety programs that deserve funding and help New Yorkers beyond E-911 services,” Anderson said.

There is one change in the budget, however: Wireless providers were asked to change the description of the surcharge on bills from “911” to “public safety communications.”

Announcement of Grant Availability to Help States Upgrade 9-1-1 Services

June 5, 2009: The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) today announced the Notice of Funding Availability for more than $40 million in grants to help states and territories improve their 9-1-1 call centers. The grants were authorized by the “Ensuring Help Arrives Near Callers Employing 9-1-1 Act” (ENHANCE 911 Act).
All States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Territories are eligible for the grants.  Among other things, the funds will be used to implement technologies to deliver wireless 9-1-1 calls with automatic location information.

The joint announcement, published in today’s Federal Register, spells out details of the grant program, including the application and administrative requirements of the Final Rule.  The funds will be awarded in fiscal year 2009.  Interested parties will have 60 days to submit applications.  Instructions for applicants can be found at: http://www.e-911ico.gov/.  Questions related to the application process can be directed to nhtsa.national911@dot.gov or 202-366-3485.