Maine 911 Parks AI on Amazon’s Overflow Line

Penobscot County’s 911 center now sends non-emergency callers to an Amazon Web Services system, and it still will not let that system answer a 911 line. The center takes more than 60,000 911 calls a year and more than 400,000 on its non-emergency lines, and it has led Maine in volume for six straight years.

Director Brad Fitzgerald said the load keeps climbing on a staff that has gone stretches without a full roster. The fix on offer is not a hiring surge. It is a second door.

A Phone Tree Now Answers Penobscot’s Business Line

Fitzgerald told an I-Team survey that dispatchers were working long hours as volume rose every year. “It can be such a quick, fast, workload, and it could be an extended workload that puts a lot of stress and strain on our staff,” he said.

The center started looking in 2023 for relief that would not change how it handles emergencies. On October 24, 2023, Penobscot County commissioners approved up to $86,500 to buy an Amazon Web Services answering service for the business line. Then-director Chris Lavoie said call volume had risen nearly 28 percent since 2018, and the center was down 12 of 36 full-time trained seats, six open and six still in training.

THE PENOBSCOT BUY

1. 2023: The center starts hunting for a way to cut pressure without changing 911 handling.
2. October 24, 2023: Commissioners approve up to $86,500 for the AWS answering service.
3. After launch: The bot sits only on the non-emergency line; humans still take every 911 call.

Lavoie said at the time that the bot would not shunt people away, and that “the A.I. bot is only going to be on the business line.” Fitzgerald, who holds the job now, still treats every inbound call as if it could be an emergency. “If someone calls, regardless of what they call about, we’re still going to do what we can to help them because obviously they called for a reason,” he said.

Only 6 of 22 Centers Were Fully Staffed

The buy sits on top of a hole the state already measured. Maine’s Emergency Services Communication Bureau runs Next Generation 911 for 25 public safety answering points. A February 29, 2024 report to the legislature, built from agency surveys and 122 anonymous dispatcher questionnaires, found the roster problem was not local color. It was the system.

Of the 22 centers that answered, the study found only 6 of 22 surveyed centers fully staffed, or 27 percent. Eight centers, 36 percent, had vacancy rates from 6 percent to 30 percent. Another eight, also 36 percent, sat between 42 percent and 57 percent empty. The commission called the shortage critical in parts of the state and a concern “in both the short and long term.”

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Among dispatchers who answered, 26.3 percent said their center ran below minimum staffing on every shift, and 29.8 percent said it happened one to three shifts a week. A 61.5 percent share said their center used mandatory overtime to stay above the floor. Uncoordinated hiring, the report said, was already poaching trained people from one Maine center to another.

A 2025 state hiring document from the same bureau still put statewide turnover at about 30 percent a year. The seats Penobscot could not fill in 2023 were not a one-year dip. They were the market.

What Callers Get Instead of a Dispatcher

The live system is not a 911 robot. Fitzgerald calls it a phone tree. It answers the 10-digit non-emergency line, offers prompts, can still reach a dispatcher, and can text a link so a caller files a report online instead of holding for a person.

AWS described the same stack in a public-sector architecture note: put Amazon Connect on administrative lines, use Amazon Lex to read a caller’s intent, Amazon Polly to speak the prompts, and Amazon Pinpoint to send the follow-up text. A trained call-taker can also dump a 911 call that turns out not to be an emergency into that tree. Penobscot has not handed that second step to the software. Fitzgerald said the center will wait.

WHAT THE AWS LINE DOES IN PENOBSCOT

• The number: It answers the non-emergency line and does not pick up 911.
• The prompts: Callers get options for issues that do not need an immediate response.
• The escape: The tree can still connect a person to a dispatcher.
• The text: It can send a link so the caller files a report from a phone.

Asked whether more of those calls would hit dispatchers without the service, Fitzgerald said yes. Asked whether the diversion was huge, he said no. “Would I say it’s an astronomical number that it has taken away? No it hasn’t but it has taken away a percentage. I think even a small percentage is still helping the burden on our staff.”

That is the quiet claim. A small percentage is enough to justify the contract. It is not a count of jobs filled.

Virginia Beach Already Clears 45 Percent Without an Agent

Vendors are not selling Maine a custom toy. They are selling a contact-center product already in the field. AWS Newsroom said on January 5, 2026 that Amazon Connect was in 150-plus 911 centers, handling non-emergency calls so operators could stay on emergencies.

📺 @NBCNews on how AI is assisting 911 call centers: Amazon Connect is now at 150+ centers nationwide, handling non-emergency calls, so operators can focus on emergencies and respond faster. @GadiNBC toured a center in California to see the technology in action.… pic.twitter.com/bczgN2And5

— AWS Newsroom (@AWSNewsroom) January 5, 2026

Where the same stack has been allowed to run longer, the diversion is no longer “a percentage.” The City of Virginia Beach said that after an April 2024 go-live, about 45 percent of non-emergency contacts were resolved with no live agent, work it equated to about six full-time employees. That center handles more than 200,000 emergency calls and another 350,000 administrative calls a year. Josh Nelson, the city’s IT solutions manager, said cutting that piece of the load lets people “focus on the more mission-critical priority of incoming emergencies.”

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, in a November 17, 2025 paper drawn from site visits and 14 interviews, said some centers had reduced non-emergency volume by up to 40%. At Jeffcom 911 the first drop in administrative calls was 40 percent year over year, then settled at 33 percent, with a 5 percent or greater rise in 911 calls answered within 15 seconds. Monterey County’s emergency communications department averaged a 36 percent cut, with a peak near 39 percent in 2024, and on a typical day the software closed more than 100 non-emergency calls with no human. Monterey also told NTIA adviser Jeremy Hill that retention moved from 43 percent to 67 percent after the integration.

HOW MUCH THE OVERFLOW DOOR TAKES

Jefferson County’s early AWS figure, a 10 percent to 12 percent offset in daily volume, sits closer to Fitzgerald’s modest claim. The later deployments show where the same door goes once a center lets it eat the routine queue. NENA’s answering target is still 90 percent of 911 calls picked up within 15 seconds. The pitch is that the overflow line is how a short bench hits that clock.

Hill Says Interest Turned Into Hunger

Jeremy Hill, a public safety adviser at NTIA and a former emergency-communications director, has been walking 911 leaders through that pitch. He said interest flipped over about a year and a half.

It’s gone from a resistance to a curiosity to now, I would even say, a hunger.

Jeremy Hill, Public Safety Advisor, NTIA

Hill still will not sell replacement. “I do believe the technology could be there, but I don’t see us ever getting away from a human in the loop,” he said. “There’s still that human compassion, that empathy that really drives home the mission of what we do in public safety.” Fitzgerald landed in the same place. “Having a human to deal with those things is the safest option,” he said. “We’re waiting to see how the technology evolves, and that will obviously dictate how we evolve with this.”

A survey of Maine’s local and regional 911 centers found two already using some form of AI, including Penobscot, and three others that planned to launch some form of it within a year. Most directors who answered said they saw a benefit and still wanted a longer track record. Some pointed to the cost of upgrading the gear. Brad Williams, interim director of the Portland Regional Communications Center, said there was no timeline. “It’s something that is worth exploring,” he said.

Why Maine Still Will Not Put AI on 911

Williams’s own examples show why the next request will not stay on the 10-digit line. “You’d be surprised at some of the 911 calls we get. Any type of holiday we get asked ‘What time are the fireworks?’” he said. Those calls already sit on 911. If the software is allowed to skim them, the human-only door starts to leak.

That is the argument the rest of the country is already having, and it is the wrong snapshot of what Maine actually switched on. People talk about a bot taking a break-in call from a closet. Directors in this state have already written that call out of scope. The live object is a business-line tree that texts you a form. The fear is a language model on a life-or-death line, which is why prompt-injection jokes write themselves and why a hold-time complaint is still the only civilian case for saying yes. People who have waited on a non-emergency queue will take a pickup. People who have dispatched a home invasion will not.

NENA has stood up a working group on the human-in-the-loop protocols and transparency it wants around those tools, naming bias and lost oversight as the risks. Hill’s own paper still puts quality checks and safeguards next to every success rate. That is not a rule that a Maine caller must be told a tree, not a person, picked up the business line. Fitzgerald does not pretend the tree is a dispatcher. He also does not claim it closed the hole on the roster.

Empty Seats Keep Selling the Split

Other cities have already used the same software on a narrow slice of 911 itself, such as repeat calls about a crash already in the system. Maine’s live deployment is the other product: keep 911 human, and let Amazon’s contact center be the front door for everything a short staff cannot afford to hear. Peers that let that door take a third to 45 percent of the overflow are not waiting for a stronger track record. They are converting unanswered routine work into a vendor queue, then counting the minutes that return to 911.

Maine still has 16 of the 22 surveyed centers below a full roster, and a 2025 hiring notice that still talks about 30 percent yearly turnover. Penobscot’s own director will only claim a percentage, not a headcount. The $86,500 tree takes pressure off the people who remain. It does not hire them. Until those seats fill, the next center in line is being offered the same split, and the hunger Hill named is hunger for that door, not for a robot that says 911.