Six years ago, shortly after the Legislature enacted his first state budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom embarked on a celebratory tour to tout the spending plan’s major provisions.
Newsom’s last stop was in San Francisco, where he bragged about increasing fees on telephone service to finance an upgrade of California’s 911 emergency communication system, whose deficiencies had become painfully apparent during a series of destructive and deadly wildfires.
“During my first week in office, I proposed making crucial updates to modernize our antiquated 911 system,” Newsom said during a media event. “The idea that it’s 2019, and we are using analog systems designed decades ago is astounding, and we need to make investments to make sure the technology aligns with the devices people are using in their daily lives.
“California’s antiquated, analog microwave network must be upgraded to a digital network to maintain safety operations that can integrate into the 21st century technology everyone is using,” Newsom added.
Fast forward to 2025. Wildfires still plague the state, including the massively destructive fires that swept through Los Angeles neighborhoods. Californians also remain at risk from earthquakes and floods, not to mention crimes and medical crises.
They still are depending on an emergency communication system that Newsom denounced as antiquated. What happened to the promised upgrade?
Since 2019 the state has spent $450 million on a new system, but this year Newsom’s administration threw in the towel, abandoning what had already been built and declaring it unworkable and that the process must start all over again.
The Sacramento Bee laid out what happened — or didn’t happen — in a lengthy piece of investigative journalism:
“California settled on a design that no other state had implemented: a regionalized approach that divided the massive state into four sectors.
“Between 2019 and 2025, California paid four technology companies over $450 million to build out its Next Generation 911 system, a more advanced emergency communication tool that would provide dispatchers with enhanced location services and other ways for the public to communicate with first responder operators.
“But when the time came to turn that system on, it didn’t work.”
In 2024, California’s Office of Emergency Services switched on a few dispatch centers as a test and discovered that it was operationally so flawed that officialdom “decided to scrap the regional design and go back to the drawing board,” the Bee found. The state now proposes a new design similar to what other states have adopted. Cal OES will seek proposals next year for a substitute, the Bee reported, “at an additional cost of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The failure is not just money down the drain. It compels Californians to continue relying on a system whose shortcomings put their lives and property in jeopardy.
Sadly too, the 911 debacle is not an isolated case of inept technological adoption — even though California is the global leader in cutting edge tech and its governor once wrote a book outlining how it would transform governance.
The governmental landscape is littered with information technology projects that have failed to deliver the promised benefits, have experienced huge cost overruns or have been abandoned.
The poster child is the state’s most ambitious technology project, called the Financial Information System for California, or FI$Cal for short, launched in 2005 as a one-stop application for managing state finances. It has consumed more than a billion dollars, is many years overdue and is not likely to be completed until sometime in the next decade, if ever.
The common denominator, demonstrated anew in the 911 project, is the effort to create something new, rather than relying on systems with proven functionality — which is the bureaucratic equivalent of reinventing the wheel.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.