(The Center Square) – After years of delays and $456 million spent on getting California’s Next Generation 911 system off the ground, two bills aim to fix the problems that have plagued the system’s rollout.
The NextGen 911 system, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office report, puts the project’s costs so far at $456 million, well above the $132 million originally projected.
“We’re back starting from scratch,” Sen. Tony Strickland, R-Huntington Beach and co-author of Senate Bill 985, told The Center Square. “That would give law enforcement the tools they need to keep us safe. That’s why we need more things like what I’m pushing for, accountability and transparency in this process, so we don’t make the same mistakes wasting taxpayers’ money.”
Strickland’s bill requires the Office of Emergency Services, which oversees the NextGen 911 transition, to submit reports to the California Legislature regarding implementation of the costly system. That bill passed out of the Senate Emergency Management Committee on April 14.
A similar bill introduced in the state Assembly, Assembly Bill 1805, would require the California Office of Emergency Services to submit a report to the Legislature with recommendations for developing and launching the NextGen 911 system. The report would also have to identify challenges faced by implementing the new system statewide.
“This bill is not just a step in the right direction for NextGen 911,” Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, D-Stockton, testified about her bill in the Assembly Emergency Management Committee on Thursday. “This is an opportunity to remember the people that 911 is meant to serve, and to put in the work so that our constituents have an emergency call system that they can rely on.”
The goal of the California NextGen 911 system, Ransom said, is an effort to update the emergency system, transitioning it away from an outdated “legacy” wire system and to an internet protocol system. These upgrades will allow 911 callers to share text messages, voice messages, photos and location data with dispatch centers, and re-route calls to other dispatch centers during emergencies affecting large numbers of people.
Such a modern system has the benefits of increasing the speed of communication with those who need 911 services with the agencies that provide those services, as well as allow those agencies to coordinate more efficiently, Ransom told the Assembly committee.
“Unfortunately, this project has spent nearly half a billion in taxpayer dollars with too little to show for it,” Ransom testified. “When people call 911, they are facing very real emergencies. We all know that when you’re in trouble, you call 911. We are leaving Californians without the best level of access to services, and this is simply unacceptable.”
Ransom’s bill calls for an audit of the NextGen 911 system and remakes the NextGen 911 Advisory Board into an oversight board and requires quarterly reports about the project’s status.
“The folks we represent have been told three times now going back to 2010 that Next Generation 911 is coming, and it’s just around the corner,” Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the California chapter of the National Emergency Number Association, testified in support of Ransom’s bill on Thursday. “We don’t want to go through the process another time to find ourselves four years from now right back where we are starting now. This is important life-saving technology.”
No one testified in opposition to Ransom’s bill on Thursday, and no opposition has been expressed to her or Strickland’s bills, according to legislative analyses of both bills. Both bills now head to the appropriations committees in their respective chambers of the Legislature.
According to a report issued in February 2026 by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the Legislature started pushing for a transition to a NextGen 911 system in 2015. Between 2021 and 2024, 23 dispatch centers starting transitioning voice calls to the NextGen 911 system, but reported a slew of problems, including outages, dropped calls and routing problems.
The Office of Emergency Services stopped the transition to NextGen 911 in 2025, citing concerns related to network complexity, operational burdens and other issues. The agency is still moving forward with rolling out NextGen 911, however, releasing an updated transition plan in late 2025 that projects that the legacy system will be decommissioned in 2030, eight years later than originally planned.
The Legislative Analyst's Office noted Gov. Gavin Newsom allocated $181.4 million from the State Emergency Telephone Number Account in his 2026-27 budget, released in January, to support the Office of Emergency Management’s administration of the 911 system, which includes the transition to NextGen 911.
Other states have rolled out their own NextGen 911 systems. Pennsylvania launched its system in 2025, while in 2024, Georgia’s state representatives looked into launching one in the Peach State, according to previous reporting by The Center Square.
Officials with sheriff's offices in Orange, Humboldt and Tulare counties and police departments in Sacramento, San Diego and Stockton did did not respond to The Center Square's request for comment on Thursday or were unreachable. The Peace Officers Research Association did not have anyone available to answer questions before press time.
