On the night of March 14, a Cadillac drifted into the wrong lane and was struck head-on by an oncoming UPS truck southeast of Powell. Both drivers suffered serious injuries, with the man behind the wheel of the Cadillac left in critical condition.

When the first 911 call came into the Park County Communication Center, GPS data placed the scene of the crash near Crown Hill Cemetery. In fact, the vehicles had collided on Wyo. Highway 295, about 4 miles to the south, and it took an alert trooper with the Wyoming Highway Patrol to route the first responders in the right direction.

“Was it a significant time delay? No,” said Monte McClain, the communications supervisor for the Park County Sheriff’s Office. “But four minutes in a life-and-death situation is still four minutes.”

“We need to fix this,” McClain said.

During the Wyoming Legislature’s recent Budget Session, lawmakers took a step toward fixing that problem.

Senate File 41, “Expanding Next Generation 911,” doesn’t directly upgrade Wyoming’s emergency service, but it does lay the groundwork for improvements to be made in the future.

“This is setting up for the new, Next Generation 911 so we can adequately cover and better triangulate where people are located when a [emergency] call is phoned in,” state Sen. R.J. Kost, R-Powell, the bill’s lead sponsor, explained at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February.

The legislation adds a seat to the Wyoming Public Safety Communications Commission representing emergency dispatchers and tasks the commission with creating statewide guidelines, standards and rules for implementing Next Generation 911 systems. Once rules are in place, Wyoming should be able to seek federal grants to help fund the expensive upgrades to the state’s half-century-old system. Currently, the state is ineligible, being one of 13 states that couldn’t apply for such grants in 2019, state 911 Coordinator Troy Babbitt said, and it could miss out on millions of dollars in the future if it lacks statewide rulemaking authority for 911.

Without the bill, “the missed opportunity cost will be tremendous [for] the smallest state in the union with some of the largest expanse to cover with 911,” warned Byron Oedekoven of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police.

Emergency communications systems are currently purchased on a county-by-county level and funded by a monthly surcharge on phone lines in the county, with the fee generally set at 75 cents per line per month. However, McClain, who’s the president of the Wyoming chapter of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials-National Emergency Number Association (WYAPCO-NENA), said the surcharge is often failing to cover rising costs. For instance, he said Natrona County received less than $800,000 from the phone fees in 2020, but spent $1.7 million on 911 service. Park County was better off, collecting $262,743 in fiscal year 2020-21 and spending only $143,833. However, just two years ago, the E-911 fund ran a nearly $192,000 deficit — halving its reserves — when the county had to purchase new equipment.

Upgrading to Next Generation 911 will only bring more expenses: The federal government estimated in 2018 that deploying the technology across the country would cost between $9.5 and $12.7 billion and take a decade — and costs have risen since then.

In implementing NG911 service, “we need all the assistance possible,” McClain wrote to lawmakers in February, adding, “without federal grant funds being available, we will be forced to place the burden of 911 upgrades to meet federal standards for Next Generation 911 on the local county governments and their constituents.”

In a recent interview, he said Wyoming is “kind of behind the curve” on NG911 implementation, lagging behind Nebraska, Montana and Utah.

Emergency communications officials across the state “have worked pretty tirelessly to push this [SF 41] through so we can as a state, as a whole, decide, how do we want this to look, how do we want this to work?” McClain said.

Participating in NG911 is particularly important for agencies like the Park County Sheriff’s Office, he said, which sometimes needs to handle incidents that cross state lines. Under the current setup, if a 911 call about a rollover in Bridger, Montana, happens to be routed to the dispatch center in Cody, McClain must forward the call to a non-emergency number — which strips all the location data — to transfer it to the correct agency in Montana. By moving from copper telephone lines to what’s effectively a cloud-based computer network, state boundaries are no longer an issue with NG911, he said. Further, the new technology will allow dispatchers to receive text, images and even videos from reporting parties, access the internet of things — such as smart watches — and generally get better data to help determine the location and nature of the emergency.

Currently, a caller in crisis “may get a lane and a road turned around or a particular area misinterpreted and then all of a sudden they’ve got slow response,” Sen. Kost said.

McClain added that, in Park County, there have been issues where 911 calls have been plotted north of Powell when the emergency is actually in the Willwood area south of town.

Lawmakers across the state generally saw the need for preparing the state for the next generation of emergency services.

“I think it’s something we have to do,” state Sen. John Kolb, R-Rock Springs, said before a unanimous Judiciary Committee vote to endorse the bill.

SF41 passed the Senate on a 29-1 vote and cleared the House — where state Rep. Sandy Newsome, R-Cody, led the bill — by a margin of 48-10. Reps. Dan Laursen, R-Powell, and John Winter, R-Thermopolis, were the lone Big Horn Basin lawmakers to oppose it.

The legislation takes effect immediately.

“With this we are now positioned as a state to go forward with saying, ‘Here’s how the framework for the future of 911 should be,’’’ McClain said.

That doesn’t mean the Legislature’s work is done, however: Given the expense of modern dispatching equipment, 911 coordinator Babbitt suggested that the current surcharge of 75 cents per phone line per month may need to be raised. He said that’s something that would “probably be addressed” in the 2023 Legislative Session.