BILL ANALYSIS ------------------------------------------------------------ |SENATE RULES COMMITTEE | SB 1375| |Office of Senate Floor Analyses | | |1020 N Street, Suite 524 | | |(916) 651-1520 Fax: (916) | | |327-4478 | | ------------------------------------------------------------ THIRD READING Bill No: SB 1375 Author: Price (D) Amended: 5/12/10 Vote: 21 SENATE ENERGY, U.&C. COMMITTEE : 10-0, 4/20/10 AYES: Padilla, Dutton, Corbett, Florez, Kehoe, Lowenthal, Oropeza, Simitian, Strickland, Wright NO VOTE RECORDED: Cox SENATE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE : Senate Rule 28.8 SUBJECT : Telephone corporations: residential telephone service: 911 calls SOURCE : AT&T Verizon Frontier DIGEST : This bill requires local telephone corporations to provide every subscriber of tariffed residential basic exchange service, rather than every existing and newly installed residential telephone connection, with access to 911 emergency service. This bill also deletes the requirement in existing law which requires telephone corporations to inform subscribers of the availability of 911 emergency services in a manner determined by the Public Utilities Commission, and instead requires telephone corporations to inform residential subscribers who have received notice of suspension or disconnection of service CONTINUED SB 1375 Page 2 for nonpayment of certain information, including options to avoid suspension or disconnection of service and the availability of 911 emergency service. ANALYSIS : According to the author's office, this bill aims to update the requirement that all California residences have access to 911 emergency service in recognition of the increase in telephone subscribers who are abandoning landline service in favor of wireless or other technologies. (The author's office has indicated that there are provisions in the bill that can be considered work in progress.) Access to 911 - Current law enacted in 1994 requires all landline telephone corporations, to the extent permitted by existing technology or facilities, to provide every residential telephone connection with access to 911 emergency service regardless of whether an account has been established. The law prohibits any corporation from terminating this "warm line" service for nonpayment of any delinquent account. The intent of this law is to ensure that people can always call 911 from their home even when they just move in and regular phone service has not started yet or when regular service has been discontinued because they cannot afford to pay their telephone bill. The law also requires telephone corporations to inform subscribers of the availability of warm line service in a manner determined by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). The bill does the following: 1.Requires LECs to provide 911 access to every subscriber of tariffed basic residential exchange service, thereby eliminating the requirement in current law that every connection have "warm line" access to 911 before an account is established and after disconnection for any reason. 2.Retains current law prohibiting LECs from terminating 911 access for disconnect due to nonpayment. (AT&T aims to limit this to 90 days or some other specified period after disconnect for nonpayment but the Public Safety CONTINUED SB 1375 Page 3 Answering Point (PSAPs) are not yet in agreement.) 3.Requires LECs to inform residential subscribers facing disconnection for nonpayment of options for Lifeline and other low-cost services with 911 access. Benefit and Cost of Warm Line Service - While the warm line requirement is intended to enhance public safety, no data or reports of actual emergency calls being placed on warm lines have been identified. Telephone corporations, 911 service administrators, the PUC, and the State of California 911 Emergency Communications Office have been asked to provide this information, including any data or reports related to an apparent surge in false or "phantom" 911 calls in southern California that peaked in early 2009. A state 911 report dated July 2009 reports that 25 million calls are placed in California each year, and about two-thirds of those calls are made on wireless telephones. Calls to 911 on warm lines are a tiny fraction of all 911 calls. The State of California 911 Emergency Communications Office, which is within the Office of the State Chief Information Officer, reports the following total number of 911 calls transmitted on warm lines statewide for recent months: 1.March 2010 - 11,039 2.April 2010 - 13,728 It is unknown, however, how many of these were phantom calls or were made by a person in a real emergency because that requires examining data from individual PSAPs. These 2010 numbers are higher than the numbers of calls made on warm lines identified in a PUC study in 2009, which found the following number of calls on warm lines statewide: 1.January 2009 - 8,602 2.February 2009 - 10,208 3.March 2009 - 9,155 The PUC study tried to determine how many calls were CONTINUED SB 1375 Page 4 phantom or real by examining dispatch records at PSAPs. Although dispatch records did not reveal conclusively what calls were real people calling 911 in a real emergency, the PUC study was able to draw the following conclusions: 1.A majority (58 percent) of the warm lines generating 911 calls did so only once, confirming that warm lines per se are not problem lines. 2.Excessive repetitive calling from the same line to 911 accounted for almost 6,000 false calls a month but was limited to only 569 problem warm lines. 3.At least three percent of calls made on warm lines resulted in a transfer to a secondary PSAP for fire or emergency medical response, indicating these were not phantom calls. This percentage of calls does not include calls dispatched by primary PSAPs for police, police/fire, or other emergencies that require law enforcement presence. Thus, the limited data available on 911 calls made on warm lines reveals that some warm line calls are phantom and some are calls made in a real emergency. Note: The findings section of the bill could give the impression that most call on warm lines are phantom according to the Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications staff. An amendment making reference to the PUC findings could clarify that impression. Telephone corporations (and their ratepayers) incur the cost of maintaining the facilities for warm lines and the telephone number associated with each line that registers at the local PSAP if a 911 call is transmitted on the line. The companies claim that these costs have increased because of rapid growth in the number of warm lines as subscribers discontinue landline service and transfer to wireless, cable, or VoIP service. The PUC reports that the total number of landline access lines in California has decreased from 24.77 million in 2001 to 20.25 million in 2008. When customers abandon wireline service, the wire to CONTINUED SB 1375 Page 5 the residence remains as a warm line. The total number of warm lines statewide is now at about 2 million, up from about 150,000 in 2005. AT&T is working on language to remove the requirement to maintain the embedded base of about two million warm lines. Some PSAPs want LECs to be required to keep existing warm lines if the prior subscriber was disconnected for nonpayment, but AT&T claims its records do not allow it to determine retrospectively if the reason for disconnect was nonpayment. AT&T Complaint Case - Current law generally requires telephone corporations to maintain warm lines indefinitely. In 2005, the Utility Consumers' Action Network filed a complaint with the PUC challenging AT&T's then-existing policy of providing warm line service for only180 days after billed service was discontinued. The PUC found that AT&T's policy violated the warm line requirement and imposed a penalty of about $1.7 million. AT&T appealed the PUC decision, and on May 24, a California Court of Appeal upheld the penalty and nearly all of the PUC's findings. The court held that the PUC erred in finding that AT&T violated the warm line requirement for new residential units when there was no request for warm line service and in finding that AT&T violated customer notice requirements but concluded that these errors did not require any reduction in the penalty "Phantom" 911 Calls - Telephone corporations and the 911 County Coordinator Task Force report that PSAPs sometimes receive 911 calls that are triggered by damaged or aging lines, weather, or other causes. Not knowing whether there is a real emergency, public safety officials respond to the homes where these calls originate, thereby draining local government resources and making those responders unavailable for other public safety duties. They claim that the incidence of phantom 911 calls is increasing as customers abandon landline service and the number of existing warm lines continues to grow. Related Legislation AB 424 (Torres) establishes an education campaign to CONTINUED SB 1375 Page 6 instruct the public on the appropriate use of the 911 emergency number system. This bill is in the Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee. AB 2545 ( De La Torre) creating parity in the funding of the 911 emergency response system between users of post-paid service and prepaid service. This bill is in Senate Rules awaiting assignment to a committee. FISCAL EFFECT : Appropriation: No Fiscal Com.: Yes Local: No SUPPORT : (Verified 5/26/10) AT&T (co-source) Verizon (co-source) Frontier (co-source) CALCON California State Sheriffs Association CALTEL PORAC SureWest OPPOSITION : (Verified 5/26/10) 911 County Coordinator Task Force CALNEA TURN ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT : AT&T indicates this bill is designed to find a solution to the problems created by aging warm lines and phantom 911 calls. A warm line is a telephone connection for which there is no customer account, but which allows a person to make an outbound call to 911. AT&T states, "Current law, Public Utilities Code Section 2883, requires local telephone companies to provide telephone connections with access to 911 emergency service - to the extent it is permitted by existing technology. Section 2883 also prohibits disconnecting warm line service for nonpayment of an account. Due to changes in the telecommunications industry, however, what was intended as a public safety benefit has become a public safety burden CONTINUED SB 1375 Page 7 that also imposes costs on the state, local governments and companies. Today, customers switch carriers with relative ease, taking their phone numbers with them and receiving 911 service from whomever is their current provider. No company owns the customer or the telephone connection inside the house. Today, a warm line provisioned in 1995 could be connected but the customer has no landline phone to plug into it because they have gone all wireless. Or, the warm line could be connected only to the outside of the house because the jack and inside wiring now is being used by a new service provider the customer has chosen. Or, the warm line could be connected to an abandoned building. Or, the warm line could be not connected to anything at all because the building no longer exists and no one called to tell the warm line provider. Once a customer leaves the original company providing the warm line, there is no practical way to determine what happens to that warm line down the road. A warm line could remain unused for years. These unconnected or duplicative warm lines provide no benefit, but due to water, weather and animals they can short, sending a "phantom" 911 call to a public safety agency. While the public safety agency knows that a 911 call is coming from a warm line, it does not know if it is a phantom 911 call or a real one - without expending 911 operator time and dispatching law enforcement officers. Answering and checking out a phantom 911 calls can delay a response to a real emergency thereby posing a public safety risk." ARGUMENTS IN OPPOSITION : TURN believes the bill as amended would element warm line service to those customers who voluntarily disconnect wireline service for any reason and, although this may not be the intent for the existing two million warm lines in California. TURN supports language that maintain warm lines for customers disconnected for nonpayment with no time limitation and which expands the customer notice requirements. They urge that all interested stakeholders be included in any further discussions which take place on the bill since they were not included in the May 12 amendment discussion. DLW:nl 5/26/10 Senate Floor Analyses CONTINUED SB 1375 Page 8 SUPPORT/OPPOSITION: SEE ABOVE **** END **** CONTINUED