O'Rielly Pushes for Circulation Items Changes

and recirculated as official meeting items no later than that three-week-out "white copy date," Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said in a blog post Tuesday suggesting an overhaul of the agency's circulation items process. Circulation items generally are less controversial and less time sensitive, meaning they often circulate among commissioners for months without getting votes, O'Rielly said. He said any item that has circulated for six months should be taken out of circulation automatically because it "is often stale and likely would require more work to reflect the current state of the record." O'Rielly said an item circulating that long with only one or two votes typically doesn't have widespread commissioner support and is unlikely to get enough to trigger must-vote procedures. Either the chairman's office should work with staff and commissioners to retool the pulled items so as to find consensus or the yanked items should be put on the open meeting agenda, he said, likening it to how the Senate handles nominations. Currently at the FCC, he said, long-circulated items get added to meetings even when they clearly lack support and there has been little work to modify them. He said that adding them to the meeting as a placeholder "for some yet-to-be drafted consensus document that will hopefully emerge in the short time before the meeting" means commissioners themselves often are having meetings with outside parties on the proposals without even knowing "what is actually on the table." Current FCC procedures allow for notably small windows of notice to the publication and consideration by commissioners, O'Rielly said, saying items on circulation as of that white copy date can be added to the monthly agenda one week before the meeting, during the Sunshine period when outside parties are blocked from contacting the FCC to weigh in. O'Rielly said any draft "that needs significant rewrites" during the white copy period should be pulled for consideration later, and nothing should be added to the agenda a week before the meeting "absent extraordinary circumstances." The office of Chairman Tom Wheeler is reviewing O'Rielly's blog post, emailed a commission spokesman. "The chairman welcomes constructive ideas on process from all commissioners.” The blog was the latest in a series of agency process changes O'Rielly has advocated in blog posts (see 1602240070 and 1501160041).