Wednesday in Starkville, a group of local emergency management officials met to hear from Bob Wedgeworth, president of the Mississippi Civil Defense Emergency Managers Association (MCDEMA) discuss the group’s legislative agenda.

MCDEMA hopes to convince state legislators in January to change the way the proceeds from the $1 E911 fee on cell phones is distributed. Their goal is pretty simple: The group wants almost all of that money to go back to the E911 systems in the state’s 82 counties.

Here’s what you need to know about those fees. The $1 fee is assessed on both land lines and cell phones. For land lines, 98 cents of that dollar goes back to the county to fund its E911 operations. For cell phones, however, the counties receive just 69 cents of that dollar on subscription cell phones and just 65 cents on pre-paid cell phones.

Most of what is not returned to the counties is deposited into an interest-bearing account ear-marked for cost recovery expenses for cell phone carries. The idea is that the carriers would use the fund to be reimbursed for any costs associated with making their products/service compatible with the E911 system.

To make a claim on that money, carriers have to show proof that their costs are directly related to E911 service, though, and each year fewer and fewer claims are made. That account has grown to $37 million, money that no one seems to have access to. It’s just sitting there, growing.

Meanwhile, every county E911 system in the state is suffering a serious annual shortfall. In Lowndes County, the county and city have been covering the shortfall to the tune of $250,000 each year for the past 10 years. That’s a pretty common story. Oktibbeha County has been spending the same amount to keep its E911 system out of the red. In Clay County, the yearly subsidy is $200,000.

At the meeting, everyone agreed the red ink was a result of the decline in land lines, which returned 98 cents on the dollar.

But as I listened, something just didn’t quite click.

The situation reminded me of one of those “what would you rather have?” math questions from high school.

Consider: Twenty-five years ago, a man has a wife, two teens, one land line and no cell phones. Each month on this phone bill, he is charged $1 to provide for E911 service, which means each month his county gets 98 cents.

Today, a man has one wife, two teens, no land line and four cell phones. When his cell phone bill comes in, he sees a $4 charge ($1 for each phone) for E911 service. The county, as we know, currently gets 69 cents for E911 services on cell phones. That comes out to $2.76.

See what I mean? Twenty-five years ago, that four-person household contributed 98 cents for E911 service. Today, that same household is providing almost three times that amount.

It seems pretty obvious that this sea of red ink for E911 services is not primarily the result of the cost-recovery funds. While I don’t dispute MCDEMA’s assertion that most of that cell phone fee be returned to the E911 systems in the counties, it wouldn’t even come close to balancing the books for E911 service.

The real problem, then, is not how the proceeds from the fee are dispersed, but the fee itself. A $1 fee simply doesn’t cover the cost of operating our E911 system.

There appears to be two rational solutions: Either increase the fee to $2, maybe even $3, or insist that carriers pick up far more of the expense than they are currently being asked to shoulder, which would be the only way the taxpayer won’t get stuck for the cost.

Neither will happen, of course, because – you guessed it – politics.

Our legislature will not raise that fee because it would be considered a tax hike, words that are blasphemy in Jackson. As for asking the carriers to step up? Somebody wake me up when the legislature asked any big business to do something it doesn’t want to do.

So MCDEMA’s only choice, it seems, is to recover more of those cell phone fees, which means the counties will have to provide a bit less money to keep its E911 systems in operation. That $250,000 might shrink to the low, low bargain price of, say, $150,000 a year.

In the meantime, the dime-store politicians in Jackson will still get to brag about how they are keeping taxes low, which is a lie.

Taxes are going up as a result of their “principled stands.” The difference is those tax hikes are found on the local level. The same holds true with education funding. When the legislature fails to meet its funding obligations for education, it is the cities and counties that have to provide those funds through local taxes. Our legislators know they can abdicate their responsibility by simply passing the buck to the ignorant local, which allows them to maintain their mythical “fiscal hero” status.

But here is the hard truth: Every year, residents in Lowndes County spend $250,000 in taxes to keep the E911 system operating.

You can “thank” our own state legislators for that.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].