Despite widespread concerns from the leaders of county Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) across the state, Gov. Kim Reynolds has signed a budget bill — Senate File 659 — without a line item veto of a provision that authorizes the state to “request reimbursement from each joint 911 service board for reasonable costs” and requires local 911 service boards to reimburse the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management within 30 days.

As a result, every county in the state will be required to pay some amount of money out of the phone surcharge revenues it had previously received back to the state just as the new fiscal year begins, and in Marshall County, that projected figure is $31,684.33. Unsurprisingly, Marshall County 911 Communications Director Rhonda Braudis is unhappy with the change and worries that it will continue to hamper local agencies going forward.

She hopes to see more firm parameters put in place so that PSAPs like hers can’t simply be charged on a whim whenever the Iowa Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management decides it needs more money.

“Is next year gonna be $50,000? And then the year after that $70,000 and then the year after that, $90,000? What is reasonable cost? So that kind of creates a problem and an unknown in our budgetary process,” Braudis said. “We need to make sure that we have the resiliency. We need to make sure that we have the ability to keep moving forward, so it’s just a fine tune on a budget process. You need to make sure that you’re never going over that.”

Currently, Marshall County 911 does have money set aside for future projects as part of an effort to save for them in a fiscally responsible way.

“We have to always look at the future, and a lot of our technology and location-based services really depend on those funds. So that does bring an absolute risk to the community members. (In) the communities that we serve, when somebody calls in and they don’t know where they’re at, and the technology had to be sacrificed that year, we’re always gonna do everything that we can, but that technology comes with a dollar sign. And that’s what those budgets pay for,” Braudis said. “We’re going to go back and see what we can do.”

Marshall County Sheriff Joel Phillips expressed a similar sentiment in a statement sent to the T-R.

“I absolutely support statewide interoperability and 911 improvements to support all Iowans, but not at the expense of local efforts that have made substantial investments and prioritize public safety emergency communications,” he said. “It makes it difficult to plan long-term funding needs to meet advancements in emergency communication technology when 911 Service Boards are charged undefined ‘reasonable costs’ associated with delivering 911 traffic to PSAPs.”

Braudis added that the governor’s signing of the bill despite widespread opposition highlights the need for further education on 911 services that individual counties provide. Braudis has shared information about the situation with members of the local 911 commission, and the solution she sees as the most reasonable to mitigate the problem is to simply raise the phone surcharge 25 cents to $1.25 per month, an increase of $3 per year. Without it, she said, the burden will fall back onto local property taxpayers.

“A single coffee is more than double that $3 per year, so when it comes to the surcharge, please, when there is a vote for that, vote for an increase. It hasn’t been increased for many years,” Braudis said.