House Bill Concerns 911 Wireless Funding — The Pennsylvania House. last week sent to the Senate a bill to restructure the E-911 Wireless Fund and ensure its viability in the future, reports State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129).
House Bill 583 would authorize the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) to provide counties with helpful suggestions to cut costs, including joint purchasing, regionalization and consolidation, all with the aim of freeing up funding in the E-911 Wireless Fund and saving individual counties a considerable amount of money, thus ensuring the continued availability of county 911 services.
The bill also eliminates the current back billing system in the E-911 Wireless Fund, whose budget is increasingly growing, and makes technical changes that would expand the spending authority for counties and their Public Safety Answering Points to ensure compliance with the 70 percent personnel funding allowed by law.