Rep. Randy Rushing, R-Decatur, is hoping a new bill he plans to introduce will pick up steam so that it will help rural 911 centers, like Newton County, see a significant bump in fees collected by the state’s 911 taxes and fees on phone service.
This has been a bill that Rushing has investigated for a few years to see what may be the best solution. Originally, he looked at the rules of how the 911 money was distributed, specifically whether the cell phone money goes to the place of where it was sold or their place of residence. Outside of burner phones, Rushing said most of that money was already going to county where the cell phone user lived.
However, Rushing found out that phone companies, such as AT&T, C-Spire, Verizon and others, receive 28 percent of the 911 fees the state collects each year. The fees were originally supposed to help phone companies expand 911 service across the state.
Now that 911 service is offered throughout the state, Rushing wants to slash the phone companies’ cut of funds so that money can go back and help local counties with their emergency dispatch.
“We pretty much have 911 across the state right now,” Rushing said. “That money was originally supposed to give the companies help to expand 911 across the state, especially on cell phone networks. Now that those networks have been established, they don’t need near that much to help them perform maintenance on the existing system.”
What Rushing proposes is to cut the percentage given to the phone companies from 28 percent to the 5-8 percent range. While no official numbers have been run, the counties and state could see as much as a 32 percent increase in funding if the phone company cut was dropped from 28 percent to 5 percent.
“That would be a significant increase to our rural areas,” Rushing said. “It would help them be able to fund their county’s dispatching without putting more burden on the local taxpayers.”
Rushing said he’s currently trying to find supporters in the House and Senate to help support the bill.
Rushing also plans to reintroduce a bill that would allow victim restitution to be paid first before the local governments and courts to give victim’s families a better chance of collecting those judgments in civil courts. Currently, local governments and the courts take the first cut of fines paid back by defendants.
Once those governmental obligations are paid, Rushing said it becomes harder to force defendants to pay.
“Once the court gets its fines and fees paid, many of them stop paying, and it becomes harder to force those criminals to pay,” Rushing said. “If the victims can get their portions paid first, the courts might have a better chance to collect the full amount of the fines and restitution.”
Currently, Rushing said the beginning of a new four-month session is always slow, as new representatives and senators are getting acquainted with returning public servants.
“Right now, we’re basically just trying to get to know each other and developing relationships with the new representatives,” Rushing said. “The deadline to submit bills is usually a little later because of that, and we won’t really see any of the budgets or main bills get passed until later in the session.
“But we’re hearing that our collections are up this year. So it looks like we may be able to expand funding for some things that we’ve neglected over the last few years.”
One thing that Rushing said the House has already done is to pass the remainder of funding that was not approved last session for the teacher pay raises. The legislature passed funding last year based on the incorrect number of teachers.
“We went in and passed that right off the bat,” Rushing said. “That was something we said we’d do, and we did that. It now goes to the Senate.”
