Gavin Newsom spent more than $450 million on a regional emergency call system that flopped and was canceled—meantime, the old system risks “catastrophic failure.”
California once built massive infrastructure projects—dams, highways, and aqueducts—that were the marvel of the world. During the Great Depression, engineers erected the Golden Gate Bridge in four years, ahead of schedule and under budget. But those days are over. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has been unable to complete, and hardly able to begin, construction on its high-speed rail system. Many other government projects are beset by delays, cost overruns, and dreams that never materialize.
Though the bullet train has become the most famous symbol of this dysfunction, Newsom has overseen an even more important system failure: the overhaul of California’s 911 emergency line.
During his first year in office, the governor confidently projected that he would replace the state’s emergency call system within three years, a goal that officials previously estimated would cost $132 million. But nearly seven years later, the state has spent more than $450 million on a regionalized “Next Generation” digital system that suffered such appalling failures and disruptions during its initial rollout that the Newsom administration scrapped it entirely.
Meantime, the old system is hanging on by a thread—and it’s only a matter of time, some believe, before it goes dark.
For years, California has needed to replace its old analog 911 system with a modern digital system that uses location, text, and video services to identify people in need quickly. Other states, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, have single statewide “Next Gen” systems. But in 2019, after years of planning, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) adopted a regional approach, naming four contractors responsible for designing, building, deploying, and operating the new technologies across four regions and a statewide backup provider.
The buildout was glacial. Cal OES and contractors apparently spent months surveying sites and testing software in a lab. The pandemic, which should have deepened the developers’ sense of urgency, “stopped a lot of progress,” according to a Cal OES official. It took more than two years for a single county to activate the technology fully.
By 2022, contractors had launched Next Gen in at least a couple local dispatch centers. The results were disastrous. Dispatchers in Tuolumne County, the first to launch the technology at full capacity, were unable to process calls, identify locations, or immediately see callers’ phone numbers. When they tried to transfer calls, the line on the other end would remain “silent.” A whistleblower claimed that citizens were “losing faith in the 9-1-1 emergency system.”
For good reason: Tuolumne’s emergency system experienced multiple breakdowns. According to an internal document obtained by an NBC affiliate, the county’s network suffered a blackout for some 12 hours straight. In another case, a man who attempted to call 911 five times to report that his garage was on fire couldn’t get through. In yet another, dispatchers could not connect the lines after receiving a “911 call of an active heart attack.”
“Could you imagine making the scariest phone call of your life and thinking no one is coming?” the whistleblower said.
By Christopher F. Rufo, Haley Strack
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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Haley Strack is an investigative reporter at City Journal.
