LINCOLN, IL — Cellphone users should be asked to pay more in fees to help support emergency telephone systems, a Logan County official says.

Dan Fulscher, director of the Logan County Emergency Management Agency and Emergency Telephone System Board, is asking the Lincoln City Council and Logan County Board to support a resolution calling on the state to allow additional money to be raised through telephone surcharges.

Fulscher said the local 911 system is supported primarily through a $1.95 surcharge for landline phones. There are fewer landline phones in use each year, however, and cellphone surcharges, which were imposed in 2004, have not yet caught up to fill the gap.

“There is a 73-cent surcharge on each cellphone, but that means that if people turn off their landlines, then it would still take three cellphones to get that money back,” he said. The local enhanced-911 systems receive only 57 cents of that surcharge.

Fulscher said his budget is $688,000 per year and employs 10 people.

“We can keep going for this year without having to make cuts,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be an effective director if I wasn’t looking to the future and thinking about the consequences of what less revenue would mean.”

Fulscher isn’t asking the council or County Board for more local funding. He is asking for resolutions of support, working on a belief that enhanced-911 administrators statewide will be asking for additional funding next year.

The Lincoln City Council tabled the vote earlier this month.

“This funding has to come from someplace and if it doesn’t come from phone surcharges, he may have to ask the city and county for more money and we don’t have it,” Alderman Kathy Horn said.

The Logan County Board is expected to discuss the proposed resolution next month.

“Every county is going to have to do this,” Fulscher said. “We are just one of the first to go public with the message.”

Fulscher said he would like to see the surcharge on cellphones increased and would also like to see the state allow local governments to decide on the surcharge.

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