By DAVE HAMRICK
dhamrick@TheCitizenNews.com

If you've been paying a charge for 911 service on your cellular phone bill, you may be due a refund.

Fayette County commissioners passed a resolution in 1999 approving a fee of $1 per phone per month to be added to cell phone bills to help pay for enhancements to the 911 system, but there have been glitches and the county is not yet collecting the fees.

But at least one cell phone company has been charging its customers based on the county's resolution, according to county officials.

The money is intended to help pay for equipment that would enable 911 dispatchers to trace the exact location of a call from a cell phone.

That sort of technology would have come in handy last year when a young Fayette mother, Esther Green, was car-jacked and managed to dial 911 on her cell phone. Green kept the connection open and directed officers to her location without alerting her attacker, but officials say the new equipment would have taken the guesswork out of the situation.

Green is to be honored today by the CTIA Wireless Foundation for her quick thinking in the incident.

Calls like Green's, from wireless phones, make up about 28 percent of the call volume at Fayette County's 911 center, said director Cheryl Rogers. “That goes up significantly when there's an accident,” Rogers told a group of Fayette officials during a joint city/county planning meeting recently.

Some time after Fayette approved its resolution, the state attorney general gave the legal opinion that money from cell phone charges can't be collected until Fayette's cities approve resolutions similar to the county's, Rogers said.

City and county leaders told Rogers to compile all the necessary information so the city councils can put the matter on their agendas. She did so last week.

Once all the resolutions are passed, then Fayette and its cities will have to enter into contracts with each wireless phone provider to both collect the fees and purchase equipment on their end to make the calls traceable. The fees will be used to pay for both the equipment for the 911 center and the equipment for the cell phone companies, said Rogers.

As for fees that were collected in error, Rogers said she is unsure whether the county will be able to go ahead and use the funds, or whether they should be refunded to the customers. “If I were them, I'd contact the company and ask for a refund,” she said.