Congress Mulling Bills Seeking 90-Day DTV Delay
Congress is weighing legislation that would delay for 90 days the Feb. 17 DTV transition, but language is not final nor is it clear a delay has widespread support, House and Senate aides said Tuesday. The 90-day delay falls short of what Senate Commerce Committee Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., would prefer, but it’s where the consensus is forming, Rockefeller told reporters Tuesday. A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the 90-day delay proposal is “on the table.”
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Senate Republicans are likely to balk at the delay, Senate aides said. Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., released a strong statement in opposition Monday, and his spokesman said he remains against it. It isn’t clear whether the bill has enough votes to pass the House. Also uncertain is whether the legislation to delay the date would include a provision exempting the NTIA converter box coupon program from government Anti-Deficiency Act accounting rules. But that bill has widespread support and could pass the House under suspension of the rules, a procedure used to quickly move non-controversial bills. Passing the ADA exemption would give the NTIA immediate flexibility to resume sending out coupons without having to wait for money from expired and unredeemed coupons to be returned to the Treasury.
Meetings were ongoing Tuesday on whether to combine efforts, House aides said. Meanwhile, AT&T surprised many by signaling support for the three-month delay, in a letter released late Monday to House and Senate Commerce Committee leaders. Calling the issue “thorny and complicated,” CEO James Cicconi said that licensees should be reimbursed for the delay and buildout requirements and other license terms modified to account for the delay.
CEA had several “positive” meetings with the Obama transition team on a range of matters including DTV, CEA President Gary Shapiro told us in an interview Tuesday. “We were surprised” when the Obama team wrote congressional leaders last week to seek the DTV delay, Shapiro said. CEA fears that the Obama team failed to look “at all the angles” before coming out publicly in favor of putting off the Feb. 17 deadline, Shapiro said. For example, he wonders whether the Obama team took concerns of first responders adequately into account, he said.
Coupon-eligible converter boxes already are “piling up at retail,” so manufacturers may stop making them if the DTV deadline is postponed, Shapiro said. “We think we did our job,” Shapiro said of the CE industry’s role in bringing over 180 models of boxes to market and persuading thousands of retailers to carry them. It and other industries also excelled by getting the word out to the public on DTV, he said. Studies show more consumers know about Feb. 17 than “can identify the sitting vice president,” Shapiro said. “CE by law is putting labels” on all its products telling consumers about the Feb. 17 analog cutoff, Shapiro said. If the deadline is put off, “this goes to our credibility,” he said. Shapiro suggested that groups that privately oppose a postponement have come out publicly in favor. “No one wants to offend the incoming president,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro has urged Obama to “explore any need for additional funding” to send coupons by first-class mail to end three-week delivery delays from mailing at the standard rate. He also wants Obama to “explore additional funding for government call centers and funding to local grassroots groups to answer questions about the DTV transition,” he said. CEA doesn’t think its calls for additional funding represent a departure from the group’s longstanding policy of remaining neutral on government subsidy programs, Shapiro told us. He acknowledged that others “may have a different interpretation.”
The NTIA has done a “phenomenal” job of running the DTV coupon program “with the little they were given to work with,” Shapiro said. If he has any regrets about snafus in the coupon program that have given rise to calls to delay the DTV transition, it’s that the NTIA “should have raised the warning flags earlier” that the program would soon reach its funding limits and would need to put new coupon orders on waiting lists, Shapiro said.
Still, Shapiro thinks critics have taken unfair “political shots” at the NTIA and thinks charges that the agency mismanaged the coupon program are groundless, he said. The criticism “doesn’t help future public service,” he said. He said he was “devastated” when he learned the Obama transition team hadn’t asked acting NTIA Administrator Meredith Baker to stay on through the analog cutoff. In an interview last week, Baker said she and her team were told “we need to be out of here by the 16th” of January. The NTIA confirmed Tuesday that Baker has tapped Karl Nebbia, currently the associate administrator for the agency’s office of spectrum management, to replace her as acting administrator. Bernadette McGuire-Rivera remains associate NTIA administrator, directly supervising the coupon program.