It took less than an hour for Jefferson County law enforcement officers to track down a little girl reported missing a year ago in Oskaloosa.

Officers there credit the quick turnaround to the county’s Amber Plan, modeled after a national program that activates an urgent bulletin distributed by area broadcasters in the most serious child-abduction cases.

It turned out the child was hiding in a trailer next door. But abductions that have received national attention in recent months haven’t always turned out so well.

A statewide Amber Plan Task Force aims to develop the infrastructure to help prevent unhappy endings in Kansas.

The 30-member group, formed by Atty. Gen. Carla Stovall in March, meets again at 1 p.m. today in Room 106 of the Landon State Office Building in Topeka.

The 30-member group had been meeting since March and hoped to announce an official plan by October, said Mary Tritsch, director of communications for the Kansas Attorney General’s Office.

The task force today will continue working out the technicalities of getting information to radio and television stations, defining which scenarios merit an Amber Alert, training law enforcement and media, and coordinating the system statewide, Tritsch said.

Jefferson County Sheriff’s Capt. Tim Byers, a task force member, said his agency’s Amber Alert system had been in place for more than a year and the statewide coordinating effort would be helpful for local jurisdictions.

“It’ll save a lot of work for local agencies,” he said.

Lawrence Police Sgt. Mike Pattrick said the last urgent kidnapping case in Lawrence was in February 2001, when then-17-year-old Natasha Helm took two children she had been baby-sitting for a Lawrence mother to Kansas City, Mo., where she was later arrested.

“We do have protocol in place to handle missing and kidnapped children,” Pattrick said. “It’s just not been locally termed an Amber Alert.”

Rapid response is crucial in cases involving child kidnapping. Statistics from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children show 74 percent of children murdered by nonfamily members are killed within the first three hours of their abduction.

The Amber Plan was created in 1996 after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was kidnapped and murdered while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Tex.