California’s deployment of next-generation 911 (NG911) technology throughout the state—effectively on hold since last August—is expected to be restarted after the state conducts a new procurement to select vendors to implement the much-delayed project as early as the end of this year
By Donny Jackson, Editor
California’s deployment of next-generation 911 (NG911) technology throughout the state—effectively on hold since last August—is expected to be restarted after the state conducts a new procurement to select vendors to implement the much-delayed project as early as the end of this year.
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Management Services (Cal OES) Chief Deputy Director Lisa Mangat told members of the Cal OES State 911 Advisory Board said that previous NG911 deployment contracts with vendors expired last August. As a result, a request-for-proposal (RFP) process will be conducted to select vendors under new contract terms that will be designed to better address the challenges that the NG911 effort has experienced during the past several years.
“This is an open procurement, and it’s consistent with the state rules and regulations, as it relates to securing a new contract,” Mangat said during last week’s advisory-board meeting, which was webcast.
“I don’t expect that this RFP is going to be a cut and paste from a prior RFP. We know more today, so we’re going to need to be really thoughtful about that and design it in a way that reflects the things that we know today and what the go-forward [deployment] should look like.”
A consultant with experience implementing large technical projects in California, Russ Nichols said he joined Cal OES officials in visiting each of the 23 public-safety answering points (PSAPs) that have migrated their 911 systems to an IP-based NG911—as well as other key stakeholders—and found a strong desire to see NG911 work completed.
“Across the board—across every PSAP, every vendor partner, every organization that we spoke with—there is strong support for the next-gen 911 effort,” Nichols said during the advisory-board meeting. “Everybody is anticipating and looking forward to receiving the services that are brought forward in the new technology.
“There was not a single dispatching center or PSAP that requested to move backward to the legacy environment. Nobody wanted to shut off what that have now. It doesn’t matter whether they were one of the first sites to be implemented or whether they were the last, they all enjoyed the services that they are receiving and plan to continue down that road again.”
Nichols outlined his vision for procuring new contracts with vendors that should be designed to reduce the burden on impacted PSAPs.
“Based on the feedback from the PSAPs, our vendor partners, and our other state partners, Cal OES expects to execute new contracts to continue our next-gen deployment,” Nichols said. “The new contracts allow Cal OES to improve requirements focusing on technology and the process improvements that’s we’ve learned over the last couple of months. This is going to ease that transition process and improve the support for our PSAPs.
“In the near future, Cal OES is going to be working with CDT—the California Department of Technology—to develop the procurement that will support our NG911 project. We’re targeting that RFP to be out by the end of this calendar year and expect contract execution after that.”
Mangat said she hopes to provide more specifics about the timing of the RFP during the next meeting of the 911 advisory board, which should be conducted in August.
911 branch manager at Cal OES, Paul Troxel said the restarted rollout of NG911 in California will be different than the previous initiative, at least from the perspective of Cal OES.
“We’re going to see a philosophical change in our office,” Troxel said during the advisory-board meeting. “We’re going to be actively involved in the project more. We’re not going to rely just on our vendors.
“As vendors go to a PSAP, we—the Cal OES team—are going to make sure that the vendors have communicated—that we have communicated—[so] the PSAP understands what to expect on the day of that visit.”
Troxel, Nichols and Mangat all emphasized the importance of making the transition to NG911 as straightforward as possible for PSAPs, which still must process 911 calls while the technology platform is being changed.
“The Cal OES team will be working with our vendor partners and the California Department of Technology,” Troxel said. “We want to reduce the complexity of the current network and, additionally, we want to strengthen the delivery of our automatic-location—or ALI—services.”
Mangat said the “infrastructure to support the NG911 network has been installed across the state.,” which she described as a “major accomplishment.” She also noted that the Cal OES NG911 initiative has improved location services and enabled text-to-911 functionality to be implemented throughout California.
However, only 23 of the more than 440 PSAPs in the state have implemented NG911, which has been the subject of news reports and industry scrutiny. Mangat said during the advisory-board meeting that the initial goal was to migrate all California PSAPs to NG911 by December 2024.
While the December 2024 timeline marked the most recent goal, it was not the first. Walter “Budge” Currier, who led California’s NG911 efforts for years before parting ways with Cal OES last year, told IWCE’s Urgent Communications in March 2021 that the statewide implementation could be completed by the end of 2021 or early in 2022.
This did not prove to be the case. Instead, California has spent more than $400 million on its NG911 project and has transitioned only 23 PSAPs—only four more than the number Currier noted during his presentation on the matter during the IWCE 2024 event in March of that year.
California’s NG911 rollout is being monitored by 911 officials throughout the U.S., as many hoped that the Cal OES initiative could demonstrate to others how NG911 could be deployed efficiently and effectively in all of the more than 6,000 PSAPs in the country. In addition, some public-safety advocates believed that a strong NG911 deployment in California could help justify an infusion of $10-$20 billion in federal funding to pay for a nationwide effort.
