[03/28/03] Vicksburg’s mayor signaled a continued hard-line position on the city’s direct funding contribution to emergency 911 operations Thursday.

“We’re down to the last seven days, and the county has not taken action” on asking legislators for permission to raise phone-bill surcharges to help cover the center’s continuing budget shortfalls, Mayor Laurence Leyens told members of the Warren County E-911 Commission. “We may be facing a funding crisis in the next fiscal year.”

To have a chance of being approved this legislative session, a city proposal to ask the Legislature for the permission that would be required for a 2.5-times increase on surcharges on county home and business telephones here must be submitted next week. The Legislature’s session is scheduled to end April 6.

The Warren County Board of Supervisors has made no official decision on the proposal from city officials, said District 4 supervisor Bill Lauderdale, who was also at Thursday’s meeting as the Board of Supervisors’ representative on the E-911 commission. The supervisors’ next regular meeting, their last before the scheduled end of the legislative session, is Monday.

The city’s proposal would raise the maximum surcharge for home phone lines from $1 to $2.50, and that for businesses from $2 to $5. It would limit each year’s raise to 33 percent of the current year’s cap. For home-phone bills, for example, it would result in a first-year increase to $1.33, with subsequent years’ respective caps being raised as high as $1.78, $2.37 and $2.50.

Surcharges on cell-phone lines are not included in the proposal, since they are federally regulated and not subject to state legislation. The current 911 surcharge on each Warren County cell phone is $1.

Supervisors have said that if surcharges are increased taxpayers should be able to know where the tax revenue that would have been the county government’s contribution to the 911 budget shortfall will go.

Lauderdale said Thursday that supervisors could not fairly reduce the county’s tax rate to offset the proposed increase in surcharges.

“People with a lot of property would come out way ahead and come out better than people who don’t have much property,” he said.

Supervisors and city officials met jointly in January, when Leyens presented the proposal. Since then, the E-911 commission has voted, with only Leyens dissenting, for further study of the city proposal.

Lauderdale said supervisors had planned to hold further discussions on the proposal with the city’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen, who he said recently canceled a scheduled joint meeting.

“We have some concerns that they may not know about,” Lauderdale said, without specifying those concerns.

Currently the 911 center’s budget shortfall, about $381,000 of its $840,000 annual budget, is made up by city and county property-taxpayers, with 70 percent coming from the city’s general fund and 30 percent from the county’s. The rest of the center’s budget is covered by the current phone-line surcharges.

Leyens has said the split puts an unfair burden on city taxpayers, who also contribute to the center through the county taxes they also pay.

Budget-setting season for the city and county is summer and fall, leading up to the Oct. 1 beginning of both governments’ fiscal years. The disagreement between the two, if it continues over their budgets for the upcoming fiscal year, would be in its third year.

In his brief statement at the beginning of Thursday’s meeting, Leyens said the issue may arise “for another season, and I hate that because I think this is such a simple issue.”