House Commerce Won’t ‘Rush’ Public Safety Bill, GOP Aide Says

Rockefeller is pushing the bipartisan draft bill and aims to mark it up before the Memorial Day recess, said John Branscome, counsel on the Senate Commerce Committee. The committee has a markup scheduled for May 25 but it hasn’t yet said what bills are on the agenda, a Rockefeller spokeswoman said. The upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11 is a “driving force” for Rockefeller, Branscome said. The senator thinks “it has to be done before 9/11” and “we're going to do everything we can” to meet that date, he said. Hutchison’s office is nearly in “lock step” with Rockefeller on the public safety pieces of the bill, said David Quinalty, a Republican staffer on the committee. “We have an opportunity on the Commerce Committee to develop legislation that’s bipartisan,” gives first responders a “world-class communications network,” promotes industry investment, improves government use of spectrum, and provides billions of dollars to reduce the national deficit, Quinalty said.

But the 9/11 anniversary isn’t as hard of a deadline for House Commerce Republicans. Everyone would like to finish before Sept. 11, “but the answer is not to rush, rush, rush,” said Neil Fried, GOP counsel for the committee. “I do think we're going to see progress before Sept. 11,” but it will be a “tough challenge to actually pass law and get it to the president” by that date, he said.

The House is watching the Senate, Fried said. “If half the Congress speaks, we will certainly pay attention,” Fried said. There are “multiple issues at stake,” he said. “There are our public safety needs, there are our broadband needs, and there are fiscal needs, and the right package will address all of this.” House Commerce will have another spectrum hearing later this month, Fried said. Last year, both parties in the committee supported a commercial auction of the D-block. “But the discussion is by no means over,” Fried said.

Ranking Member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., wants to “rally around” the 9/11 anniversary to “drive the process forward,” said Roger Sherman, Democratic chief counsel for the Communications Subcommittee. If Democrats had any control of the schedule, “we would drop everything else … and focus on this alone.” While Waxman supported a D-block auction last year, Sherman said it’s “premature” to choose an approach. “We see merits on both sides,” he said.

At the APCO Summit, several public safety officials raised questions about governance and some other specific items in the Rockefeller/Hutchison draft. While the draft is “not perfect” and the committee wants feedback, Branscome cautioned the audience not to debate the bill to death. “If we become divided over details, we will fail,” Branscome said. There’s still “a real possibility that the D-block could be auctioned,” he said. “The best way to prevent that” is for public safety to present a “unified voice” supporting the bill.

The White House is “pleased that Senator Rockefeller and Senator Hutchison are taking the lead on this issue,” Terrell McSweeny, domestic policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said on a later panel. “We are going to take a close look” at their proposal."

The Senate Homeland Security Committee is also preparing a public safety bill to reallocate the D-block to public safety. Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., plan to reintroduce their bill from last Congress “fairly soon,” said Troy Cribb, a staffer on the committee for Lieberman. It’s critical that a reallocation bill be deficit neutral, Cribb said. The issue of who governs the public safety network is also important to ensure spectrum is used efficiently, to ensure interoperability and to monitor costs, she said. “Accountability and transparency” are key issues on any bill for senators on the committee, which also oversees governmental affairs, Cribb said. They will need to be “reassured that we're getting what we're paying for and that the whole process is transparent."

Rockefeller and Hutchison will work with other leaders in the Senate, including Homeland Security Committee leaders, after marking up the legislation, Quinalty said. Commerce will “work to create consensus throughout the entire body” of the Senate, he said.

Draft Circulates

A 108-page draft of the Rockefeller and Hutchison bill takes a more comprehensive approach to spectrum reform than the original Rockefeller bill (S-28), incorporating provisions from a Hutchison draft bill including additional spectrum auctions and rules designed to improve spectrum efficiency. As in S-28, the draft would reallocate the D-block to public safety and pay for the network using revenue from voluntary incentive auctions at the FCC. The draft could reduce the national deficit by $10 billion, according to a Commerce Committee summary.

The draft bill would place the public safety network in the hands of newly established nonprofit called the “Public Safety Broadband Corporation,” giving it nearly $12 billion to build the network nationwide. The Washington-based Corporation would hold the public broadband spectrum license, build and oversee the network, and set interoperability and other rules. As much as possible, the Corporation would be required to use existing commercial and government infrastructure. It would make contracts with commercial vendors to build, run and keep up the network, and sign roaming agreements with commercial providers. The Corporation would drive infrastructure deployment in unserved rural areas.

The Corporation wouldn’t be funded by annual appropriations, but instead would collect fees from network users, entities wishing to lease network capacity, and entities seeking to access or use any equipment or infrastructure owned by the Corporation. The Corporation’s board would include secretaries of Commerce and Homeland Security, the U.S. Attorney General, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. It also would include representatives from the private sector, public safety, and state and local governments. The bill would require additional consultation with a public safety advisory committee, as well as state and local governments.

The FCC could adopt public safety roaming rules, “if necessary in the public interest” under the draft bill. The rules would allow public safety networks to roam onto commercial networks with priority access during emergencies if public safety and commercial equipment is compatible and the commercial network is “reasonably compensated."

The draft bill would direct $500 million of incentive auction revenue for research into wireless broadband technologies for public safety at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and $1 billion for wireless research at the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The research money would, for example, help ensure first responders have “mission-critical” voice on LTE, Quinalty said at the APCO Summit.

The Rockefeller/Hutchison draft stresses the voluntary nature of incentive auctions, including during the spectrum repacking process. Broadcasters would not be forced to share channels during repacking. The FCC would have to “preserve station population coverage and avoid increases in signal interference during the repacking process.” Some of the incentive auction revenue would go to broadcasters and pay-TV companies affected by repacking. And must-carry stations who return some spectrum would maintain must-carry rights.

The FCC would have to auction 55 MHz of spectrum for commercial uses, including 15 MHz between 11675-1710 MHz, the 10 MHz AWS-2 H Block, the 10 MHz AWS-2 J Block and the 20 MHz AWS-3 band. The draft also envisions freeing up an extra 100 MHz of additional spectrum by reallocating and auctioning for commercial use the 3550-3650 MHz band identified by NTIA, or other spectrum identified by the executive branch, a summary of the draft said. The draft also would extend the FCC’s spectrum auction authority until 2020, an offsetting provision commonly seen in spectrum bills because it allows the government to count auction revenue that could come in during that timeframe.

The draft orders a spectrum inventory by NTIA and the FCC, and includes provisions to streamline the government’s spectrum relocation process. To improve commercial spectral efficiency, the bill would open up 120 MHz in the 5 GHz band for unlicensed use. It also would direct the FCC to promote a secondary market and update experimental license rules, and direct GAO to study receiver standards.

The draft bill includes several proposals to encourage spectrum sharing by federal agencies. It would direct federal agencies to assess the economic value of their spectrum. It also would direct NTIA to develop a strategic spectrum plan to identify how spectrum is being used across the federal government, opportunities to improve spectral efficiency, assess future spectrum needs and “plans to incorporate these needs in the frequency assignment, equipment certification, and review processes,” the committee summary said. GAO recommended such a plan in a report criticizing NTIA last week (CD May 13 p3).

The draft was written as a substitute amendment and is expected to replace S-911, introduced last week as a placeholder for public safety legislation (CD May 11 p17).

NAB praised “the sincere efforts” of Rockefeller and Hutchison in the draft bill “to address broadcaster concerns with voluntary incentive auctions,” an NAB spokesman said. “We are hopeful our remaining concerns can be accommodated.”