The shift toward NG9-1-1 was the subject of a public safety communications panel on Monday, and while the experiences of places like Michigan and California were varied, they included a common twist: pressure from public safety telecommunicator rank and file to do their jobs remotely.

911 Michigan Administrator Joni Harvey said the transition to NG9-1-1 started in 2012 in the Upper Peninsula. “Now we fast forward to 2022 we only have one county and one service district that has not migrated to the next gen system,” Harvey said.

Harvey said every county contracted its own services and worked on its own timeline.

Meanwhile in California, 9-1-1 System Manager and SWIC Coordinator Budge Currier is helming a massive project to shift the entire state to NG9-1-1 with the aim of radically reducing the 30,000 minutes per month of downtime that the system experienced each month before starting NG9-1-1 implementation. Currier said partial implementation has performed at zero downtime and his office is rapidly expanding NG9-1-1’s reach.

Officials said the desire to work from home can be satisfied by some vendors in communities with out-of-the box technology solutions. But even those agencies that have yet tried the dispatch-from-home experiment may be doing the functional equivalent in common operational situations.

“Some of you are already doing it in ways you may have not thought about,” Harvey said. “Have a mobile command unit next to a fairgrounds — that’s telecommuting. Tactical dispatch teams — that is telecommuting.

Currier added that remote capabilities of NG9-1-1 can help with staffing problems created by expensive markets such as San Francisco because facilities can be set up and people hired an hour away where living expenses are more moderate.

By Richard Goldstein