Departure of FirstNet GM Shows Struggles in Proposed Public Safety Network, Officials Say
The departure of Bill D'Agostino as general manager of FirstNet comes amid growing questions about the proposed national network for first responders and whether FirstNet has enough independence from NTIA and the Department of Commerce, public safety officials said Tuesday. On Monday, FirstNet said D'Agostino was leaving after less than a year on the job (CD April 24 p1).
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Public safety officials said D'Agostino’s departure really was in part for personal reasons, the stated reason (http://bit.ly/1hFGvb9). D'Agostino, who earned a government-level salary as GM, had been on the road almost constantly for months and the Commerce Department had recently told him that, to keep the job, he would have to relocate from his home in Orange County, Calif., to Northern Virginia, where FirstNet will be headquartered. But industry and public safety officials said he also left because of growing concerns that NTIA was playing too large a role controlling FirstNet.
"The bottom line is that FirstNet is meant to be an independent authority within NTIA,” said a public safety official who has watched the process closely. “The bottom line is they are not.”
"They're tasked with doing a business plan to make FirstNet in essence a reality, but if it’s going to function as a business it’s very difficult to do so under the bounds of government,” said a public safety and former government official. “Just the procurement process, the hiring process, all of the things the government has to go through, is almost antithetical to operating in business.” The official said FirstNet would be better off if it had been set up along the lines of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
"We are an independent authority within NTIA so, bottom line, we are a government agency and we appreciate the support NTIA has provided to FirstNet to get it ramped up,” said Ryan Oremland, a FirstNet spokesman. “We have an active 15-member board, which is the main decision making body for FirstNet, comprised of federal government, executives from wireless carriers and commercial companies with experience with startups, as well as the public safety community.” The board also listens to its Public Safety Advisory Committee to make sure its voice is “incorporated into what we do,” Oremland said. FirstNet is still housed in a sub-basement of the massive Commerce Department building.
A March Congressional Research Service report raised questions about NTIA’s involvement in FirstNet (http://bit.ly/1hCsUxc). “In helping to stand up FirstNet, NTIA administrators have, apparently, chosen to treat FirstNet as if it were to exist within the Department of Commerce in perpetuity,” the report said. “Treating FirstNet as a division of the Department of Commerce might be described as setting a course for FirstNet to become ‘another Amtrak,’ a term used by many, within and outside Congress, to denote overdependence on federal subsidies, as in the case of financial support for Amtrak.”
D'Agostino had found it a struggle to put together a plan for the network, especially after contracts expired for the original contractors to FirstNet last fall, officials said. Contracts were rebid with Information Management Resources, a veteran-owned firm, emerging as the dominant contractor through a competitive process. Some of the original FirstNet contractors are expected to be brought back, said a government official.
"From Dec. 1 until the end of March, Bill and his team had nobody working for them and they were trying to get all this accomplished and getting a lot of pressure from” Commerce, said a public safety official who has done work for FirstNet.
The FirstNet board signed off on a generic structural plan in March, but D'Agostino had not been able to complete a business plan because of government restrictions on negotiations with the four national wireless carriers, all of whom have expressed some desire to work with FirstNet, industry officials said.
Former Seattle Chief Technology Officer Bill Schrier, FirstNet’s point of contact in Washington State, initially raised the staff issue in a February blog post (http://bit.ly/OzFEwv). He said “most of the existing 35 or so contracted staff” were let go by FirstNet last year, so as of February the network only had about 25 full-time employees. “Their goal, I believe, is to have 100 or more full-time staff to do the work,” Schrier said.
"FirstNet has been doomed from the beginning,” said a former FCC wireless official, who does not represent FirstNet. “The overly-prescriptive statutory directives alone provided more than a clue. ... Now this staffing drama. In the meantime, the spectrum is still fallow, and we are no more closer to that network more than two years after the Congress passed the legislation. A disaster all around, yes. A surprise, no."
Progress is being made, Oremland told us. “It’s a different organization than six months ago,” he said. “If you include contractors and new federal employees we have brought on board and even detailees got us to more than 80 fulltime employees.” Outreach, finance, legal and communications staff are all in place, he said. “We've really built out the mid-level management.”