Nobody Checked

Maryland removed the ceiling on county 911 fees in 2022. The Comptroller was told to check whether counties actually need what they charge. In the most recent year the state has reported, it recovered $26,534 across all of Maryland, and the agency that oversees those audits wrote down that the check was never performed.

Montgomery County raised its fee 157 percent in twenty-four months. The public hearing had no speakers.

All of that came out of one phone bill.

This is Part One of an ongoing series. I do not know how many parts there will be. Records requests are outstanding with four agencies, questions are pending with a carrier and a dozen county and state officials, and what comes back decides what gets written next. Everything I receive will be published here, including anything that proves me wrong.

Montgomery County’s 911 fee sat at seventy-five cents a line from October 2003 until last summer. Twenty-two years, unchanged, through the entire transition from landlines to smartphones.

In FY26 the county took it to $1.47. This year it went to $1.93.¹ Add the state’s fifty cents and every 911-accessible line in Montgomery County now carries $2.43 a month. That is a 157 percent increase in twenty-four months, and the county projected the first of those two increases alone would generate $12.5 million in new revenue.²

None of it would have been legal four years ago.

Maryland caps this fee at seventy-five cents under Public Safety § 1-311(c)(1), with an escape hatch in the next paragraph for counties whose revenue does not cover operational costs.³ Until 2022 that escape hatch had its own ceiling. A county short on money could go to $1.50 and no further.

Senate Bill 633 — enacted as Chapter 349 of 2022, sponsored by Senators Cheryl Kagan and Ed Reilly — struck it. Maryland bills mark deletions in brackets and additions in capitals, and the enrolled text tells the whole story in one line: a county may impose a fee “[not exceeding $1.50 per month] SUFFICIENT TO COVER THE COUNTY’S PROJECTED OPERATIONAL COSTS.”⁴ Deleted phrase, replacement phrase, no number anywhere in it.

Montgomery County’s FY26 fee of $1.47 sat three cents under a ceiling that no longer existed. Everything above it exists because of that deletion.

The bill’s purpose paragraph disclosed the change. Its public-facing synopsis on the General Assembly’s own website never mentioned the fee at all, listing specialist classification, Board vacancies, training standards, cybersecurity, audit updates, and then “etc.”⁵

Anyone tracking that bill online would not have seen the ceiling come out.

The County Executive transmitted the FY27 resolution on March 13, 2026, proposing $1.93. The Council introduced it March 24 and held a public hearing on April 14.

There were no speakers.¹

The Council also held its broader FY27 budget hearings on April 7, 8, and 9. Council staff recorded that no testimony was received on this item either. The Public Safety Committee recommended approval three to nothing.

A charge on every phone, watch, tablet, and connected device in a jurisdiction of over a million people moved from proposal to committee approval without one resident saying a word. That is not apathy — nobody knew. It arrives as a line item wedged into a block labeled “Taxes & gov fees,” directly beneath a charge that is not a tax and never was.

On May 5, Councilmember Will Jawando moved to raise the Executive’s proposed fee by an additional eight cents, to $2.01. The motion carried ten to one, with Councilmember Andrew Friedson voting no. The Council then approved the amended resolution eleven to nothing.¹

The arithmetic behind those eight cents is worth reading twice. Council staff estimated the increase would generate approximately $1,577,391. The approved ECC operating budget had grown by $1,787,204 between FY25 and FY26. Staff noted the conservative estimate was meant to keep county fees from exceeding the state requirement that they not surpass eligible operating costs.

They took a budget increase, backed a per-line rate out of it, and trimmed the rate slightly — just enough to sit under the legal ceiling.

Then it vanished.

On May 29, 2026, Montgomery County notified the Public Service Commission that it had modified its fee “from $1.47 per line to $1.93 per line.” The Commission issued notice to every carrier in the county on June 29 directing them to bill $1.93, for a total of “$2.43 per line, consisting of a $1.93 county fee and a $0.50 State Fee.”⁶

Verizon confirmed to me in writing that $1.93 is what it bills.

That is the County Executive’s original number. The eight cents the Council voted for, eleven to nothing, three weeks earlier is not in it. I do not know what happened between May 5 and May 29, and neither does any public record I have been able to obtain. The straw vote is documented. The certification is documented. The reversal is not. Eleven councilmembers voted for a figure that never reached a single bill, and nothing I have found explains why.

One more detail. The Commission’s June 29 notice is stamped ERRATA. An earlier version was issued and corrected. I have asked what the original said and still have not received an answer.

When the General Assembly removed the dollar ceiling, it did not leave counties unsupervised on paper. Section 1-311(c)(7) says a county fee may not exceed what is necessary to cover eligible maintenance and operation costs. The Comptroller audits carrier collection and remittance. The Maryland 9-1-1 Board must report annually on those audits, and since 2022 that report must state whether collected fees are sufficient to cover each county’s operational costs and what measures were recommended to address shortages.

Here is what the Board reported for fiscal 2023.

The Comptroller selected eight telephone companies and commercial mobile radio service providers for audit for the period December 1, 2022 through November 30, 2023. Five were completed. The total assessed for underreported 911 fees was $26,534.72.⁷

Statewide county 911 fee collections that year were $72,981,441.81.

That is one dollar recovered for every $2,750 collected. Eight carriers examined — in a state where every phone company, cable company, and wireless reseller collects this fee.

And then the Board’s own sentence: “The Comptroller audit did not address whether fees collected were sufficient to cover each county’s operational costs for the 9-1-1 system and any measures recommended or implemented to address cost shortages.”

The legislature removed a ceiling and replaced it with a standard. It assigned an agency to verify the standard. The agency did not verify the standard, and the Board wrote that down, and published it, and nothing happened.

Do you want to know how a fee doubles twice in a county of a million people without anyone objecting? Nobody whose job it was to object was doing the job.

There is a complication that merits discussing, because it came out of my own records request and it cuts against the number above. The state’s distribution schedules show that in fiscal 2025, Montgomery County received a vendor additional payment from AT&T of $2,024,776.26.⁶ One carrier, one county, one year, seventy-six times the entire statewide assessment figure the Board published for a different year.

I’ve yet to figure out what that payment was. The schedule does not say, and the two figures cover different periods, so they are not strictly in conflict. But if examining eight carriers produces twenty-six thousand dollars and something involving a single carrier produces two million, the obvious question is what a real enforcement program would find.

Nobody in Maryland appears to have asked that question. So I have.

The same Board report publishes what every county spends on 911 against what its fee brings in, drawn from independent audits the Board itself funds.

Montgomery County in FY23: expenses of $27,109,878, with 35.46 percent of that offset by fee revenue.⁷

Statewide, fees offset 37.25 percent of county 911 costs.

Montgomery was 1.79 percentage points below that. That is the distance between Montgomery County and the middle of the pack, and it is the condition the county has spent two budget cycles describing as a shortfall requiring a 157 percent fee increase.

Twelve counties did worse that year and were charging seventy-five cents. Somerset covered 12.68 percent of its 911 costs. Kent 13.90. Calvert 15.50. Talbot 16.32. Allegany 18.30. Queen Anne’s 18.92. Washington 24.28. Prince George’s 25.37. St. Mary’s 28.26. Frederick 28.43. Howard 29.02. Harford 33.10.

In fiscal 2023, every one of those twelve counties was further underwater than Montgomery. Every one of them charged seventy-five cents. That includes Prince George’s, the only Maryland jurisdiction remotely comparable to Montgomery in size, which recovered a quarter of its 911 costs and left its fee alone.

The county has a real answer to that and it deserves stating. A ratio is not a dollar. Somerset covering 12.68 percent of a small 911 budget leaves a gap measured in hundreds of thousands. The Board’s chart puts Montgomery’s FY23 gap at roughly $17.5 million, and a county writing a check that size every year has a different problem than a county on the Eastern Shore, whatever the percentages say.

That answer works right up until you read the statute. Section 1-311(c)(7) does not license a fee sized to a county’s absolute gap. It permits a fee no greater than what is necessary to cover eligible maintenance and operation costs, and the cost-recovery exception in subsection (c)(2) exists for counties whose revenue does not cover those costs. By that measure no county in Maryland covers its 911 costs from fees. Every one of them could have done what Montgomery did.

Many of them did something. Once the ceiling came out in 2022, fees rose across the state, and a table the Police Department gave the Council this April shows where that landed. The most common county fee in Maryland is now $1.50, charged by ten jurisdictions. Four still charge seventy-five cents. The highest is $4.25 in Dorchester County.¹

Montgomery County at $1.93 is higher than all but four jurisdictions in Maryland. Its neighbor Prince George’s charges $1.41. Howard charges seventy-five cents.

The shortfall Montgomery cited is not a Montgomery condition. It is the ordinary condition of 911 funding in Maryland, and it has been since the state fee stopped being remitted to counties after January 1, 1991, leaving the state’s share to reimburse system enhancements rather than daily operations.⁸

In March 2024, the Public Safety Committee received a briefing noting a 43 percent vacancy rate at the Emergency Communications Center. The following month, the FY25 operating budget eliminated 27 vacant ECC positions.¹

The state has the same picture from the other direction. In fiscal 2023 Montgomery County reported 67 specialist vacancies to the Maryland 9-1-1 Board, more than double second-place Frederick and roughly a third of every specialist vacancy in the state.⁷ The Board’s staffing table has obvious problems — several counties reported nothing at all, and the Board notes the statute gave it no standard definitions for what it was required to collect. But the number is Montgomery County’s own submission to the state, and it is the largest in Maryland.

The county eliminated twenty-seven positions in the middle of the worst 911 staffing shortfall in the state. Two years later it is restoring twenty-five of them, at $2,621,850, funded by a fee on every device owned by every family in the county. That is a fucking round trip, and the residents paid for the return leg.

Here is the part the county has not been asked about. The recovery came first.

The October 2025 ECC update says the specialist vacancy rate has plummeted from almost 41 percent in FY24.⁹ That is the county’s word. At the October 2024 committee briefing, Council analyst Susan Farag reported the overall ECC shortage at 16 percent and the telecommunicator shortage at about 22 percent.¹⁰

The Council did not adopt the $1.47 fee until May 14, 2025 and it did not take effect until July.

The vacancy rate was nearly halved before the first increase was adopted, and had fallen substantially before a dollar of new money was collected. Whatever fixed the staffing problem, it was not the fee.

Average 911 answer times in Montgomery County were four seconds in 2021, nine seconds in 2022, and ten seconds in 2023.¹⁰ Maryland regulation requires a daily average of ten seconds or less. The county went from comfortably compliant to sitting exactly on the regulatory ceiling in two years, and its own briefings tie that directly to staffing — mandatory overtime, combined police radio talk groups, supervisors pulled off supervision and onto consoles.

That is a measured degradation in the one metric that matters when someone is doing CPR on a kitchen floor. It is a legitimate reason to spend more money on the Emergency Communications Center. The Board inspects every Maryland PSAP annually against that ten-second standard, and its FY23 report states that except as otherwise discussed, no deficiencies were observed at any of them. Montgomery was compliant, but compliant at the edge.

The audited books support the county further. Its own general fund contribution to 911 operations rose from $12,713,747 in FY24 to $13,617,307 in FY25.⁶ Section 1-312 provides that a county raising its charge may only supplement its own spending, never supplant it. On these two years the county is putting in more of its own money, not less.

The question is not whether the ECC needed money. It is why the money came from a flat charge on every device in the county rather than from the general fund.

There is a cost question nobody has put to the county either. At that same October 2024 briefing, Assistant Chief Darren Francke said at least 60 percent of the calls coming into 911 should not have gone to 911 and belonged on the non-emergency line, 988, or 311.¹⁰¹¹ He described a barking dog call occupying a call-taker while someone waited.

The center handled 836,950 incoming calls in FY25, a slight decline from the year before.⁹ If Francke’s estimate holds, roughly half a million of them belonged somewhere else. Reducing that is a cost strategy, and the county’s stated remedy was a public education campaign.

Nobody has asked what cutting misrouted volume in half would do to the cost base, or whether that was pursued with the same energy as the fee.

The county’s April staff report told the Council that in FY24 the Comptroller collected and transmitted $13.0 million for the 911 system, and that this was not enough to cover projected operating expenditures. That figure is the premise of the increase.

It is wrong, and two independent documents say so.

Montgomery County’s own § 1-312 independent audit for the year ended June 30, 2024, prepared by SB & Company and dated December 24, 2024, reports total 911 revenues of $15,944,049. The Comptroller’s distribution schedule for the same year reports $15,944,048.69. Both came from the same records request, and neither came from the county.⁶

They agree to the penny. So do the components: $14,985,096 in county fee distributions, $609,635 in prepaid wireless, $349,318 in interest.

The county understated its own audited 911 revenue by $2.94 million in the document it used to argue the fee was insufficient. The correct figure appears four pages later in the same staff report, in a table.

The cost side has a similar problem in reverse. That report projects operational expenditures of $25.5 million while its own table shows FY25 actuals of $32,199,035, and explains the gap by saying earlier figures reflected only Police Department costs while the updated figure adds Fire and Rescue and General Services.

The audits do not support that explanation. Both the FY24 and FY25 schedules were prepared by the same auditor on the same statutory basis. Expenditures went from $28,657,796 to $32,199,035, an increase of 12.4 percent. Salary, wages, fringe benefits, and overtime account for more than the entire increase; every other category combined declined. Personnel is 94.3 percent of total spending. Building expenses, the line most plausibly attributable to General Services, are $383,736, or 1.19 percent.

The cost base did not widen. Payroll grew. That is a defensible thing for a 911 center climbing out of a 41 percent vacancy rate to do, and the county should have said so plainly instead of offering an explanation its own auditors do not support.

There is a second charge on the same bill, and it raises a question the county has not answered.

Separately from the 911 fee, Montgomery County levies a telephone tax of $3.50 per wireless line per month, which generated $56.7 million in the FY27 recommended budget.¹² It is the seventh-largest tax revenue source in the county, roughly three times the hotel and motel tax.

The Department of Finance’s website states that the telephone tax is not imposed on telephone lifeline service access lines.¹³ Lifeline is the federal program that discounts phone service for low-income households.

The county code is narrower than the website. Section 52-15(a)(1) imposes the tax on three things: local exchange access lines for residences, businesses, and PBX systems, “except telephone lifeline service customers”; each wireless telephone line; and Centrex lines. The Lifeline exception is attached to the first category. The subparagraph covering wireless carries no exception at all.¹⁴

Almost nobody on Lifeline in 2026 has a landline. The program is overwhelmingly wireless. So the county’s public guidance says low-income households are exempt from a tax that its own code, read plainly, appears to impose on them. Either the website is wrong, or the code does not mean what it says, or Lifeline wireless customers in Montgomery County have been paying $42 a year they do not owe.

I asked the Department of Finance which it is. I have not received an answer.

This has nothing to do with smartwatches or family plans. It is a question about whether the poorest phone customers in Montgomery County are being taxed by a county that tells them they are not.

The fee is charged per line. Not per household, not per bill. Every phone, every cellular smartwatch, every connected tablet is a separate assessment at the same flat rate — regardless of what the household earns.

In 2019, then Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski proposed a $3.50 per-line wireless tax copied directly from Montgomery County. Residents and the county Chamber of Commerce objected that it punished anyone with multiple phones.¹⁵ Councilman Julian Jones amended it to eight percent per account rather than per line, exempting prepaid and taxing only the voice portion. Two of the council’s three Republicans crossed over in an otherwise bitterly divided budget. The average customer paid about $1.60 a month.¹⁶

Give Olszewski his due. Baltimore County collected more than $13 million in landline taxes in 2007 and was down to about $8 million by 2019. That revenue evaporated as households cut the cord and the services it paid for did not. Montgomery County faced identical math.

One county council asked what a per-line structure does to families with several devices and changed it. The other never asked.

The Comptroller should state publicly how many carriers have ever been audited for correct calculation of the 911 fee, and what the AT&T payment of $2,024,776.26 to Montgomery County represented. It should also begin auditing whether county fees are sufficient to cover county costs, which is the job the statute assigns it.

The Maryland 9-1-1 Board should answer, in its next annual report, whether county fees are sufficient to cover county costs. The statute has required that answer since 2022 and the FY23 report says it was not addressed. The Board should also answer the three items in my records request that its close-out letter did not address: whether any guidance exists on the shared-number provisions in §§ 1-310(f)(3) and 1-311(c)(4), whether any complaint about them has ever been received, and how many 911-accessible services are assessed in each county.⁶

Montgomery County should explain how eleven councilmembers voted for $2.01 on May 5 and the county certified $1.93 on May 29.

The Council should correct the $13.0 million figure in its own staff report, and withdraw the explanation that the cost base grew because General Services was added to it.

The Department of Finance should state whether Lifeline wireless customers pay the county telephone tax. If the code exempts them, the county owes refunds. If it does not, the county owes its website a correction.

The county should publish the § 1-312 audits on its own website rather than making residents get them from a state agency. I received the FY24 and FY25 schedules eleven days after asking. They are four pages long.

And the Council should do what Baltimore County did in 2019 and move to a per-account structure. The revenue can be held whole. What cannot keep working is a distribution where the family with three kids and an aging parent on the plan subsidizes the household with one phone, and nobody in Rockville has ever had to defend that choice out loud because nobody has ever shown up to make them.

I sent written questions to the County Executive’s office, the Office of Management and Budget, the Police Department, Councilmember Will Jawando, and Councilmember Andrew Friedson. When nobody answered, I extended the deadline to August 7 and asked again. The silence has continued.

I sent the same questions to Senator Cheryl Kagan, whose office replied that she was traveling and provided no substantive response. I followed up and have yet to receive a reply back from them.

The records requests tell a similar story. The Maryland Department of Emergency Management produced documents on August 7 and closed my request without addressing three of its five items. The Comptroller of Maryland acknowledged my request and asked for additional time. The Clerk of the Montgomery County Council and the Montgomery County Executive branch have not responded at all.

Every state agency I contacted answered something. No Montgomery County official or office has answered anything.

Verizon answered in writing, and its answers will appear in full in part two.

Let’s review that again. I wrote to one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world and to my own county government. The company wrote back to acknowledge my request, keep me updated on the timeline, and then to provide the response. Nobody in Rockville has given me anything more than an automated response, including the people whose job is answering records requests.

Sure, I’ve been a Verizon customer for fourteen years. But I’ve been a Montgomery County taxpayer for sixteen.

Twenty-two years at seventy-five cents. Two years to $1.93. One public hearing. Zero speakers. Eleven votes for a number that never reached a bill. One agency told to check the math, and $26,534.72 to show for it.

Part two covers how these charges land on individual devices, including whether Maryland’s exemption for devices that share a phone number is being honored.

1. Montgomery County Council, Public Safety Committee staff reports on the FY27 County 9-1-1 Fee, April 23 and May 13, 2026, including the County Executive’s March 13, 2026 transmittal memorandum, the historical revenue and expenditure table, and the draft amended resolution reflecting the eight-cent increase. https://montgomerycountymd.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=169&event_id=16862&meta_id=222592

2. Montgomery County Council announcement of the May 14, 2025 vote on the FY26 County 9-1-1 fee increase from seventy-five cents to $1.47, projecting an additional $12.5 million in revenue. https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/news/montgomery-county-council-meets-may-14-expected-vote-multiple-fiscal-year-2026-budget-resolutions

3. Maryland Code, Public Safety § 1-311, Additional Charge, including the seventy-five cent cap, the cost-recovery exception, and the limit to eligible maintenance and operation costs. https://law.justia.com/codes/maryland/public-safety/title-1/subtitle-3/section-1-311/

4. Chapter 349 of the Acts of 2022 (Senate Bill 633), Public Safety – 9-1-1 Emergency Telephone System – Alterations, enacted text showing the deletion of the $1.50 ceiling and the sponsors. https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2022RS/Chapters_noln/CH_349_sb0633e.pdf

5. Maryland General Assembly, Senate Bill 633 (2022) legislation page, showing the public-facing synopsis. https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/sb0633?ys=2022RS

6. Records obtained from the Maryland Department of Emergency Management by Maryland Public Information Act request dated July 26, 2026: Public Service Commission notices re Montgomery County 9-1-1 Fee Increase dated June 23, 2025 and June 29, 2026 (ERRATA, Maillog No. 331576); Montgomery County Maryland 911 Emergency Number Systems Program Schedules of Maintenance and Operating Revenues and Expenditures for the years ended June 30, 2024 and June 30, 2025, prepared by SB & Company LLC; Actual 9-1-1 Surcharge Fee, Prepaid and Interest Distributions for Montgomery County, FY24 through FY26; and the Department’s response and close-out letter dated August 7, 2026. Posted in full with this piece.

7. Maryland 9-1-1 Board, Annual Report Fiscal Year 2023, required by Public Safety Article § 1-307, dated October 13, 2024. https://dlslibrary.state.md.us/publications/Exec/MDEM/PS1-307_2023.pdf

8. Maryland Association of Counties, Budget, Tax Rates, and Selected Statistics, Section 9: Service Fees and Charges, recording that the State 9-1-1 fee ceased being remitted to counties after January 1, 1991. https://www.mdcounties.org/DocumentCenter/View/4163/Section-9--Service-Fees-and-Charges

9. Montgomery County Council, Public Safety Committee, update on the 911 Emergency Communications Center, October 2025. https://montgomerycountymd.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=169&meta_id=204179

10. DC News Now, coverage of the October 2024 Montgomery County Council Public Safety Committee briefing on the Emergency Communications Center. https://www.dcnewsnow.com/news/local-news/maryland/montgomery-county/montgomery-county-911-call-center-struggles-with-staff-shortages-rising-calls/

11. WTOP News, independent coverage of the same October 2024 Public Safety Committee briefing. https://wtop.com/montgomery-county/2024/10/montgomery-countys-911-services-chronicaly-understaffed-flooded-with-calls/

12. Montgomery County Office of Management and Budget, operating budget revenue detail showing Telephone Tax collections through FY27 recommended. https://apps.montgomerycountymd.gov/basisoperating/Common/BudgetRevSnapshot.aspx?ID=1

13. Montgomery County Department of Finance, Telephone Tax Information, revised July 1, 2025. https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/department-finance/taxes/excise-taxes/telephone-tax-information

14. Montgomery County Code § 52-15, Telephone tax, codified text including the scope of the lifeline exception and the definition of “line.” https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/montgomerycounty/latest/montgomeryco_md/0-0-0-150585

15. Baltimore Sun, coverage of opposition to the proposed $3.50 per-line Baltimore County cell phone tax, May 13, 2019. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2019/05/13/unfathomable-baltimore-county-leaders-residents-critical-of-350-a-line-monthly-cell-tax-plan/

16. Baltimore Sun, coverage of the Baltimore County Council vote converting the proposed per-line cell tax to an eight percent per-account tax, May 22, 2019. https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-county/bs-md-co-tax-votes-20190522-story.html