Vermont Enhanced 9‑1‑1 board seeks $5.3 million in budget, requests reinstatement of $300,000 capital reserve

Barbara Neal, executive director of the Enhanced 9‑1‑1 Board, told the House Appropriations Committee on Feb. 21 that the board is requesting about $5.3 million for the coming fiscal year and is asking the legislature to reinstate a $300,000 annual capital replacement line item. Neal said the reinstated line would be held in the Enhanced 9‑1‑1 special fund and carried forward year to year to smooth the cost of system upgrades and replacements that occur on roughly five‑year cycles.

The request represents about a 10.1% increase over the current fiscal year request, Neal said, and far exceeds the 3% baseline the board had expected. She told lawmakers the increase reflects three drivers: the proposed $300,000 capital replacement set‑aside; personnel and salary increases; and about $71,000 in higher annual maintenance costs for the board’s statewide 9‑1‑1 system provider, which will take effect when a contract extension begins in October and runs for 30 months.

Neal gave a brief overview of the board’s responsibilities and operations. The Enhanced 9‑1‑1 Board was created by the legislature in 1994 as the single governmental agency responsible for Vermont’s statewide 9‑1‑1 system. The board oversees system design, standards, policy and operational oversight and consults with the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Public Service and the Agency of Digital Services, Neal said. The board employs about 10 staff who manage IT, databases, administration, training and compliance, and supports roughly 109 call takers statewide who work in public safety answering points, or PSAPs.

Neal described the board’s partnership model for answering calls: Vermont’s NG9‑1‑1 system routes calls to five PSAPs run by the Department of Public Safety and several local agencies, including the Saint Albans Police Department, Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department, Hartford Police Department and Shelburne Police Department. She said the system is designed so that if a primary PSAP cannot answer a call, the call will automatically route to another center to avoid queues.

Neal also reviewed 2024 call statistics. The board logged 232,009 incoming 9‑1‑1 calls in 2024, about an 8% decline from the previous year. Wireless calls made up about 77% of that volume (roughly 178,000 calls). Neal said there were about 16,000 abandoned calls last year; the median time to answer an incoming 9‑1‑1 call was about five seconds, and the average length of a call taker’s interaction with a caller was 2 minutes 17 seconds. The board recorded just over 1,000 text‑to‑9‑1‑1 messages in 2024, up roughly 16% from the year before.

On funding, Neal said the Vermont Universal Service Fund currently collects a surcharge on retail telecommunications sales (she stated the current rate as a 2%–2.4% surcharge in her presentation) and that the revenue mechanism will change on July 1 to a per‑access‑line fee that will attach to any line that accesses 9‑1‑1. She said the per‑line fee is expected to stabilize revenue and support the waterfall of programs funded by the VUSF — including the 9‑1‑1 program and, later in the distribution, the 9‑8‑8 program — through at least 2029, according to the report Neal cited.

Committee members asked a few clarifying questions about call routing and the map of PSAP coverage, and Representative Jim Harrison indicated he would follow up with any additional budget questions. There were no formal committee votes or motions recorded in the transcript during the presentation; Neal and Brenda Berry, the board’s Financial Services Director with the Agency of Administration, concluded their briefing and left the hearing.

Why it matters: The board’s budget request affects the stability of Vermont’s statewide 9‑1‑1 infrastructure, the timing of major system upgrades and the resources available to maintain PSAP operations and call‑taker training. Reinstating a capital replacement set‑aside would reduce the need for episodic, large appropriations when hardware or system components require replacement.