Deregulated Alaska Commission Seeks to Navigate Murky Waters
The Regulatory Commission of Alaska might have to push forward uncertainly in telecom matters until it meets resistance, Chairman Bob Pickett said at one in a series of summer meetings about the RCA's telecom jurisdiction after 2019 deregulation law SB-83 (see 2005130039). There should be no confusion about what authority the agency retains, said Alaska Telecom Association Executive Director Christine O'Connor in an interview.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
The RCA might have to ask the legislature to clear up telecom authority questions, Pickett said at Wednesday’s teleconferenced meeting. “The general powers issue still is sort of out there, which doesn’t give me a lot of comfort given that we’ve got some big issues in front of us,” including whether an Alaska USF will exist after it sunsets in mid-2023 (see 1808090025), he said. “At least for the short term,” the agency's chief said, it should “assert certain limited general powers for well-defined express purposes, and if the industry pushes back ... and it becomes impossible for the commission to do its work, then it’s time for us to go back to the legislature and say it’s not possible for the commission to perform its functions. Either the statute needs to get changed or get the commission 100% out of it.”
Commissioner Jan Wilson identified two choices. “Move forward and ... gloss over the general powers issue,” or “sit on our hands and wait until the next legislative session” to get clarification. Wilson’s preference is “to move forward,” she said. Commissioner Stephen McAlpine said, “I don’t believe we ought to be in the business of regulating telephone, but I also believe that [industry] should leave the subsidies at the door.”
Alaska was the 42nd state to deregulate telecom, said National Regulatory Research Institute Telecom Principal Sherry Lichtenberg. Like others, the state removed rules including tariffs and carrier-of-last resort (COLR) requirements, she said. SB-83's Senate sponsor Sen. Chris Birch (R) died last year. House sponsors Rep. Chuck Kopp (R) and Chris Tuck (D) didn't comment now.
The commission “is trying to navigate through the complexities of the text of the bill,” ATA’s O'Connor told us before the meeting. As the lead advocate for SB-83 when it was going through the legislature, O’Connor is confident of the bill's intent, she said. “But unless you were down there and in those hearings ... it may be hard to have a good understanding of what was intended.” The ATA official said she’s “hopeful” the commission will get it “as they dig into it further” and read over the legislative record and comments filed by the telecom industry and state law department’s regulatory affairs division in docket R-19-002. O’Connor doesn’t expect a final order from the commission until about two years from when the docket opened in January, she said.
The overall motivation behind SB-83 “was really to strip away ... outdated regulations,” including some that were 50 years old, and make all telecom providers subject to the same rules, said O'Connor. “Half of Alaska’s telecom companies are cooperatives [and] were already operating under the structure of what this bill did.” The law’s biggest items were removing tariffing requirements that didn’t apply to cooperatives and cutting COLR regulations that were “duplicative” of certificate responsibilities including to provide service, the industry official said.
The Alaska Regulatory Affairs & Public Advocacy section “pointed to the areas where RAPA believes the law is clear and where the legislative intent is possibly less clear,” in its comments to the commission, emailed Chief Assistant Attorney General Jeff Waller. The state office hasn’t “taken the position that the legislature should clarify” the law’s language, he said.
“Staff believes that there is a strong case that the legislature intended for the commission to retain ... general powers” over access charge ratemaking and interconnection, said RCA common carrier specialist David Parrish at the RCA meeting. However, the agency’s ratemaking process using an access charge manual is outdated, and the commission may want to issue a “statement of policy explicitly favoring cost-effective negotiated settlements of access charge rates,” the staffer said. Noting the commission has waived access charge manual requirements at least since Pickett joined in 2008, the chairman told Parrish to bring staff’s proposal for a vote at the June 24 meeting. Staff’s proposal can be an interim step, but the commission should formally revise the “opaque” ratemaking process if it never plans to apply the manual again, suggested RCA Assistant Attorney General Stuart Goering.
Later in the meeting, commissioners voted 4-0, with Pickett abstaining, to keep him chairman in FY 2021.