Pai Names Local Official to BDAC After Protest Resignations
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai added a local official to the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee after two local resignations from the body and continuing criticism of BDAC's composition. Pai appointed David Young, a National League of Cities member and fiber infrastructure and right-of-way manager in Lincoln, Nebraska, the FCC announced Monday. Young replaces Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose, California. BDAC Chair Elizabeth Bowles and other BDAC officials said last week they hoped Pai would appoint new local members to the group (see 1804040044).
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Local officials praised the addition. BDAC member and Georgia Municipal Association Executive Director Larry Hanson said he’s encouraged. “The 30 member committee currently has only two municipal members and more are needed to provide balance to the process,” he emailed. Andy Huckaba, another BDAC member and a city council member from Lenexa, Kansas, said he doesn’t know Young but is pleased Pai added a ROW manager. “He should provide critical expertise and insight to our work.” NLC is pleased, a spokesman said: “While we remain concerned about the overall makeup of the BDAC, we will continue to fight for the preservation of local control and protections for city residents and public property.”
BDAC is “heavily over-weighted in favor of those seeking attachments to poles” and “the ideas being generated are overwhelmingly lopsided,” said NARUC President John Betkowski and NARUC Telecommunications Committee Chairman Paul Kjellander in a Friday letter to Pai in docket 17-83. It’s getting late, but the FCC should increase membership to improve balance on the body, or at least include a minority report on any final BDAC paper, they said. Arkansas Public Service Commission Chairman Ted Thomas also urged better BDAC balance in a Friday meeting with Pai, said an ex-parte notice in the same docket.
BDAC proposals “call on the FCC and State authorities to override all local opposition, ignore valid competing considerations, and give private companies the right to place network equipment wherever they choose at below market rates,” Betkowski and Kjellander wrote. It’s why two local members resigned (see 1803300042), they said. “The BDAC’s composition ignores the fact that States (and localities) have every incentive to participate in the BDAC in a way that will promote deployment.”
Thomas also urged the FCC to keep non-facilities-based resellers in the Lifeline program. “They are crucial to ensure low-income households remain connected to vital telecommunication services,” he said in the Pai meeting. And Thomas urged the FCC to grant a petition by rural phone associations to review dismissal of a petition to reconsider a June 2014 decision to phase in USF support reductions based on local voice service rate floors. The pending application would provide a forum to re-examine rate-floor methodology and address other issues, “including whether it makes sense … for rural rates in some States to leapfrog the prevailing local telephone rates in the more urban areas of that State, whether more localized survey data would better serve the goal of ensuring reasonably comparable service at reasonably comparable rates, whether the rate floor requirement usurps State commission authority over local rates, and whether states like West Virginia should have the flexibility of preserving a low-cost basic tier of service to protect access to voice service for low-income and fixed income consumers or if instead hampering a state’s ability to protect its most vulnerable consumers erodes a key foundation of the network compact.”