Nebraska is responding to a series of 911 system outages caused by cut lines and power failures with proposed legislation aimed at expediting the deployment of next-generation upgrades and ensuring accountability for service providers during failures.
State Senators John Fredrickson and Wendy DeBoer, both from Omaha, introduced Legislative Bills 1255 and 1256 to address these issues. LB 1255 focuses on accelerating Nebraska’s transition to the next generation of 911 systems. LB 1256 mandates the reporting of 911 outages to the Nebraska Public Service Commission (PSC) and requires a public hearing after significant outages to investigate the underlying causes.
The bills come in response to multiple 911 outages occurring in Nebraska, particularly in August, September, November, and more recently in southeast Nebraska this month. The proposed legislation aims to prevent such incidents from jeopardizing public safety.
LB 1255, presented by Senator Fredrickson, emphasizes the regulatory authority of the PSC over both legacy and next-gen 911 systems. The bill sets a six-month goal and a one-year deadline for completing the transition to a data-rich 911 system. Companies are required to notify the state of any delays in the transition process.
Fredrickson stated, “One of the issues we saw in the outages was that the legacy and next-gen systems were not compatible for seamless redundancy. Next-gen increases redundancy and resiliency.”
LB 1256, presented by Senator DeBoer, defines a 911 outage as a significant degradation in the ability of an end user to establish and maintain communication services due to a failure or degradation in network performance. The bill mandates service providers to file outage reports with the PSC, similar to the reports submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It sets a 90-day timeline for the PSC to conduct a public hearing after receiving the first outage report.
DeBoer’s objective is to expedite the PSC’s access to reliable information from telecommunications companies, allowing faster responses from regulators and lawmakers to system problems and outages.
While these bills address critical issues related to Nebraska’s emergency response systems, other legislative proposals have been introduced, covering topics such as agricultural land ownership, a study on the impact of a conflict in the Pacific, funding for a visitors center and museum, an excise tax on commercial electric vehicle charging stations, and more.
