Colorado’s 9-1-1 task force convened last Wednesday at the Capitol to take its first official steps in a larger effort to update policy guiding the state’s emergency phone service, which is experiencing increasing outages as technology, business models and infrastructure struggle to keep pace in the digital era.

As fast became clear at the meeting, the members have a long way to go and little time to get there. The task force is scheduled to deliver recommendations to lawmakers at the end of January on how best to proceed.

Members of the task force peppered witnesses with questions even as they digested basic lay-of-the-land material. Witnesses discussed how authorities elsewhere in the country oversee 9-1-1 services and the steps being taken to ramp up reliability and establish best practices. They also discussed what municipal, county, state and regional authorities are spending on their efforts and how they’re raising the funds to pay the bills.

But, as witnesses conceded, the information they found in many cases might well be incomplete or outdated or provisional. Just collecting solid data on 9-1-1 services and regulatory regimes presented a challenge that underlined the state of flux coast to coast.

Task force members looking for a solid roadmap were presented instead with a smorgasbord of  approaches that have not been fully tested.

In Illinois there is no comprehensive plan to bring so-called next generation 9-1-1 services to the state – services that reliably pinpoint caller locations, weather cable cuts and network crashes through redundancies and can universally field text and internet messages. But 13 of Illinois’s southern counties have banded together to update regional services. The Arkansas-Texas Council of Governments similarly is launching satellite-enabled service that will cover 10 counties in the two states.

Task force Chair Sen. Mark Scheffel, R-Sedalia, asked Office of Legislative Legal Services Senior Attorney Jennifer Berman if she saw any trends in the national data she had collected.

“Are there any broad themes, certain things that are working?” he asked.

“It’s hard to speak to that,” Berman said. “There are statewide efforts … There is also perhaps a trend of grassroots efforts,” she added.

Approaches to oversight and funding are similarly varied. Some states regulate 9-1-1 through a utilities commission, as Colorado has done for landline technology. Elsewhere, state bodies only review 9-1-1 funding programs. Washington state pays for service through its general fund, which is rare. As Berman explained, most states fund 9-1-1 through surcharges on telecommunication company consumers – even though few states perform audits to make sure the money collected by companies from consumers for 9-1-1 services is actually used to pay for those services.

Colorado lawmakers in the spring created the task force after deadlocking on a bill pushed by industry to prevent the state’s public utility commission from regulating mobile phone and internet-based 9-1-1 services, which now make up the lion’s share of emergency calls. Industry argued that regulating that kind of newer traffic fell to the Federal Communications Commission.

But the FCC reported that it welcomed state-based efforts, so that discussion seems to be tabled. Task force members now seem motivated by mounting evidence that action is overdue.

Service outages and network crashes have been rising since 2010 in Colorado. The state this year is on track to see the most outages ever.

The average 9-1-1 outage in Colorado lasts ten hours, according to the state’s Public Utility Commission. Some 3,000 residents paid for 1.6 million phone minutes so far this year during which they could not have contacted 9-1-1.

Those numbers were compiled in mid-August. Winter is coming.

“As a physician, my concern is that we make sure everyone in the state gets access to 9-1-1, because even a five-minute delay is critical,” said task force member Sen. Irene Aguilar, D-Denver, in her opening remarks.

House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, task force co-chair, argued the committee had the opportunity to set a productive tone that would serve to smooth the path for legislation in the fall. She was hinting at the intense lobbying on all sides that typically characterizes telecommunication proposals at the Capitol.

“We need a lot of information and facts that we hope this committee can provide in an objective way to legislators,” she said.

Scheffel made a point to note that the task force intended to work in partnership with industry. “We’re at a crossroad,” he said, celebrating the spirit of entrepreneurship that has revolutionized communications. “We want to capture that spirit, but not at the expense of anything we hold dear, including public safety.”

The task force has scheduled its next meetings for October 11 and 25.