The 911 debacle is the latest failed technology deployment in California

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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Six years ago, shortly after the Legislature passed his first state budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom embarked on a holiday tour to tout key provisions of the spending plan.

of Newsom the last stop was in San Franciscowhere he bragged about increasing phone service fees to fund an upgrade to California’s 911 emergency communications system, whose shortcomings became painfully obvious during a series of devastating and deadly wildfires.

“In my first week in office, I proposed that we make important updates to modernize our outdated emergency call system,” Newsom said during a media event. “The idea that it’s 2019 and we’re using analog systems that were designed decades ago is mind-boggling, and we need to make investments to make sure the technology is in line with the devices people use in their everyday lives.”

“California’s aging analog microwave network must be upgraded to a digital network to support safe operations that can integrate into the 21^St technology of the century that everyone uses,” added Newsom.

Fast forward to 2025. Wildfires are still plaguing the state, including the massive, devastating fires that have engulfed neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Californians also remain at risk from earthquakes and floods, not to mention crime and medical crises.

They still depend on an emergency communications system that Newsom condemned as outdated. What happened to the promised upgrade?

Since 2019, the state has spent $450 million on a new system, but this year the Newsom administration threw in the towel, abandoning what was already built and declaring it unworkable and that the process must start over.

The The Sacramento Bee reported what happened — or didn’t happen — in a lengthy journalistic investigation:

“California has settled on a design that no other state has implemented: a regionalized approach that divides the vast state into four sectors.

“Between 2019 and 2025, California paid four technology companies more than $450 million to build its Next Generation 911 system, a more advanced emergency communications tool that will provide dispatchers with improved location services and other ways for the public to communicate with first responders.

“But when it came time to turn that system on, it didn’t work.”

In 2024, the California Office of Emergency Services turned on several dispatch centers as a test and found it operationally so flawed that officials “decided to scrap the regional design and go back to the drawing board,” the Bee found. The state is now proposing a new design similar to what other states have adopted. Cal OES will seek proposals next year for a replacement, the Bee reported, “at an additional cost of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Failure is not just a drain on money. This forces Californians to continue to rely on a system whose deficiencies put their lives and property at risk.

Unfortunately, too, the failure of 911 was not an isolated case of inappropriate technological appropriation—although California is a world leader in cutting-edge technology, and its governor once wrote a book outlining how this will transform management.

The the government landscape is littered with information technology projects which failed to deliver the promised benefits, suffered huge cost overruns or were abandoned.

The poster is the state’s most ambitious technology project, called tThe California Financial Information Systemor FI$Cal for short, was launched in 2005 as a one-stop government finance management application. It has consumed more than a billion dollars, is many years late, and is not likely to be completed until sometime in the next decade, if ever.

The common denominator demonstrated again in the 911 project is the effort to create something new rather than relying on systems with proven functionality – which is the bureaucratic equivalent of reinventing the wheel.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.