The Associated Press

LOGAN, Ohio - Without a way to determine where a 911 call came from in 2001, several Hocking County rescue crews set out in search of a woman on a mobile phone whose husband who was having a heart attack.

The woman, a tourist, did not know the location of the cabin where she was staying, Brent Runge, director of operations for the county's 911 system, said Wednesday.

By the time help arrived 18 or 19 minutes later, the man was dead.

Now, Hocking County, one of the last Ohio counties to add 911 service, became the state's first county to be fully equipped to track the location of 911 calls made by cell-phone users.

The service, which started last year, is financed by a 0.25 percent sales-tax increase that voters approved in 1998 to initially pay for 911.

Now a legislator is working to expand the cell phone call-tracking technology statewide.

State Rep. Tom Niehaus, a New Richmond Republican, plans to introduce legislation next month to add a monthly 65-cent fee on cell-phone users. The proceeds would be split among cell-phone companies, a state 911 coordinator and 911 operators to buy equipment to locate cell calls.

Similar proposals date to at least 1999, but have been opposed by some legislators who consider the fee a tax increase.

In Ohio, half of all 911 calls come from the state's 5 million cell-phone users.

Cell-phone callers can be located two ways. Chips installed in newer phones use satellites to send their locations to a 911 call center, where computers map the positions.

In the second method, a cell-phone company detects a phone's signal at multiple towers, then calculates the caller's location.

Forty states have already enacted fees to help pay for the technology.

The federal government ordered all phone companies and emergency dispatchers be equipped with the tracing technology by October 2001.