(1) (a) Effective January 1, 2021, a 911 surcharge, referred to in this section as the "surcharge", is hereby imposed on service users in an amount to be established annually by the commission but not to exceed fifty cents per month per 911 access connection.
On or before October 1, 2020, and on or before October 1 each year thereafter, thecommission shall establish the amount of the surcharge for the next calendar year. The amount of the surcharge must be reasonably calculated to meet the needs of governing bodies to operate the 911 system. Upon establishing the amount of the surcharge, the commission shall send notice of the new amount to all service suppliers. The new amount takes effect on the following January 1.
The amount of the surcharge imposed per 911 access connection must be uniform,regardless of the technology used to provide the 911 access connection.
Each service supplier shall collect the surcharge from its service users. The surchargemust not be combined with the local emergency telephone charge described in section 29-11-102 if it is listed on the service user's monthly bill. The 911 surcharge is the liability of the service user and not of the service supplier; except that the service supplier is liable to remit all 911 surcharges that the service supplier collects from service users.
(a) The service supplier shall remit the collected surcharges to the commission on a monthly basis in a manner established by the commission. The commission shall establish remittance procedures by rule. A service supplier is subject to the penalties and procedures in section 29-11-103 for the failure to collect or correctly remit a surcharge in accordance with this section.
A service supplier may deduct and retain one percent of the surcharges that are collected by the service supplier from its service users.
(I) Remittances of surcharges received by the commission are collections for the local governing body, not general revenues of the state, and shall be held in trust in the 911 surcharge trust cash fund, which is hereby created. Except as provided in subsection (3)(c)(II) of this section, the commission shall transmit the money in the fund to each governing body within sixty days after the commission receives the money for use by such governing body for the purposes permitted under section 29-11-104.
The commission may expend an amount, not to exceed four percent of the collectedsurcharges in the 911 surcharge trust cash fund, necessary to reimburse the commission for its direct and indirect costs of administering the collection and remittance of surcharges for the local governing bodies, including costs related to conducting audits of service suppliers in accordance with section 29-11-103 (7).
The commission shall establish a formula for distribution of money from the surcharge to the governing bodies based upon the number of concurrent sessions maintained by the PSAPs of each governing body. The commission shall establish the formula by October 1 of each year. The commission shall promulgate rules concerning changes to the number of concurrent sessions for which a governing body is reimbursed under this section. For the purposes of this section, "concurrent session" means a channel for an inbound simultaneous 911 request for assistance.
As part of the report required by section 40-2-131, the commission shall report on the911 surcharge, including amounts remitted and transmitted to local governing bodies.
This section does not apply to prepaid wireless telecommunications services.
Source: L. 2020: Entire section added, (HB 20-1293), ch. 267, p. 1286, § 5, effective July 10.