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.

But those days are over. Under Gov. 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, the overhaul of California’s 911 emergency line is an even more important system failure.

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. After a series of warnings and delays, in November 2025, the Newsom administration officially terminated the regional approach. In a postmortem report, Cal OES indicated that the regional rollout overwhelmed dispatch centers and was ultimately too fragile and risky to work.

Cal OES plans to start from scratch and pursue a statewide, rather than regional, approach, estimating that the new system will take until 2030 to complete.

Will it work? California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has strong doubts. In a report published earlier this year, the legislative analyst recommended that the state “pause” all implementation of the program until Cal OES can answer some basic questions, including “What Is the Nature and Scope of the Problem?” and “Will [the] New Plan Solve the Problem?” Nobody believes that the new system will be completed by 2030. “They said that 10 years ago,” one dispatcher told us.

Meantime, California is stuck with a 1970s-era emergency call system that is falling apart. The legislative analyst has warned that the legacy system is “in very poor condition and is subject to failure.” And Cal OES is woefully behind on updating other parts of the state’s emergency services.

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As of this past February, 339 dispatch centers hadn’t undergone maintenance on their call-handling equipment in seven to 10 years or more. Some equipment is built with parts not made anymore.

The result: waves of outages that have increased dramatically in recent years. According to the FCC, in 2017, California’s legacy system averaged 17,000 minutes of outages per month. In 2022, that number increased to 59,000 minutes per month. And between October 2022 and June 2024, the legacy system suffered 22,001 hours of outages—about 62,000 minutes per month. Since then, Cal OES has stopped publicizing outage numbers.

As with so many of California’s infrastructure projects, including the “butterfly bridge” and “high-speed rail,” the endless delays and cost overruns produce some hidden winners: the state officials who manage the system and the private companies that secure never-ending contracts.

In the case of Next Gen 911, Newsom employed an army of unionized officials to oversee the work and approved enormous contracts to the four main vendors: $198 million to Atos Public Safety, $108 million to NGA 911, $56 million to Synergem Technologies, and $56 million to CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies). The state is sure to spend millions more.

Meantime, the losers are always the same: the taxpayers and residents who, in this case, have to keep paying a fee on their monthly phone bill for technology that doesn’t work and keep their fingers crossed that the current system won’t fall apart when it’s needed most.

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.