911 is the right number for pols.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Tar Heel Tattler - Taxing cellular calls to 911

With the state budget in crisis, lawmakers decided to dial 911 for emergency assistance. Quietly raiding the state's Enhanced 911 Wireless Fund, budget negotiators turned nearly $58 million in cellular-phone taxes into general revenue.

The fund taxes cellular users 80 cents a month to build a system for tracking incoming emergency calls from wireless phones. It will now have to collect more taxes, probably by collecting the levy longer than the expected three more years.

"No one on the board is happy about it at all," says Richard Taylor, executive director of the North Carolina Wireless 911 Board. "This is a public-safety program," says Don Carrington, vice president of the John Locke Foundation, a think tank in Raleigh. "You'd think if they needed money to balance the budget, there are other places they could have taken it."

The Federal Communications Commission requires cellular operators to install the new system, but only so long as local-government 911 operators upgrade hardware, including computers and phone systems. The General Assembly arranged in 1998 for the surcharge to pay both costs--40% goes to local emergency centers...