County staff say regional Next‑Gen 911 vendor failed to meet milestones; commissioners move contract termination to Thursday agenda

County public‑safety staff briefed the Board of County Commissioners on Feb. 10 about persistent failures by the region’s Next‑Generation 911 vendor, NGA 9‑1‑1 LLC, and asked for authorization to terminate the regional contract and begin seeking alternative providers.

Ryan (staff presenter) said the regional Next‑Gen project began in 2021–2022 and noted the contractual completion date had been May 2023. He said NGA repeatedly missed milestones, including a recent phase‑completion milestone, and that the county had paused payment as a result. Ryan said, “I wanna make it very clear to the board members that Santa Rosa County is not paying for this out of our own tax funds. This is all funded, purely through state level grants.”

Staff’s primary operational concern is automated call data (ANI and ALI) and the ability to fail over to a partner system in Escambia County in a catastrophic event. Ryan said he lacked “confidence that we would be able to do that successfully” under NGA’s implementation, and told the board NGA had not addressed repeated contractual deficiencies in more than 120 days of correspondence.

Tom (presenter) said the county’s 9‑1‑1 call handling remains operational but that the contractor “definitely has not met their contract requirements” and that other vendor options exist. Staff requested authorization to terminate the NGA contract and to pursue replacement vendors; on Brad Baker’s recommendation, the board voted to move the termination authorization to the Feb. 13/Feb. 20 consent agenda for formal action.

Next steps: staff will proceed with a vendor search and return recommendations to the board; state grant funding is expected to remain available to support the transition. The county emphasized that, despite vendor problems, current 9‑1‑1 service is functioning and no immediate public‑safety outage had been reported during the briefing.