May 1, 2006

Your urgent action is needed Contact your member in the U.S. House of Representatives by 5:00 p.m. (EDT) Wednesday, May 2, and urge them to vote “NO” on the Communications, Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006 (COPE / Barton-Rush). Simply dial the Capitol switchboard at 202/224-3121 and ask for your member’s office.

Local governments strongly endorse promoting competition for all consumers and treating like services alike. Our nation’s cities and counties welcome video competition in their communities. Nationalizing franchising, however, would limit the benefits of video competition to a few well-to-do neighborhoods, would threaten local budgets, and would undermine the ability of local governments to protect their residents and manage public rightsofway.

Local Governments Want Cable Competition And Have Actively Sought It For Years. But Local Governments Do Not Favor:

• Subsidizing multinational communications companies’ use of local streets and rightsofway at the expense of local government budgets and local taxpayers.

• Giving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, D.C., control and oversight over how localities manage their local streets and rightsofway.

• Subsidizing service to a few welltodo neighborhoods while less welltodo neighborhoods are left behind without competition, and with higher prices and poorer service.

• Allowing telephone companies to provide new cable and broadband services only to some of their telephone customers, leaving others behind.

• Cutting current levels of financial support for local community programming and emergency communications.

• Taking away local authority to handle their residents’ cable customer service complaints.

The bill’s supporters make several claims about its supposed benefits, but they are not true.

• The bill would supposedly increase cable competition and lower cable prices.

  The Truth: Only for a chosen few. Everyone else could see higher rates and poorer service. As currently worded, the bill allows new entrants to pass by poorer neighborhoods completely, as long as they don’t discriminate against poorer residents in well-to-do neighborhoods.

• The bill would supposedly allow localities to continue to manage their rightsofway.

  The Truth: Local government rights-of-way management would be subject to oversight and secondguessing by the FCC in Washington, D.C.

• The bill would supposedly preserve localities’ 5 percent franchise fees.

  The Truth: It would reduce the revenue base on which the 5 percent is paid, meaning less franchise fees for the critical services local governments provides to its citizens, including public safety and transportation.

• The bill would supposedly prevent economic redlining.

  The Truth: It would allow new entrants to bypass poorer and minority neighborhoods entirely as long as the new entrant offers service to those groups that happen to be sprinkled about in otherwise more welltodo neighborhoods.

• The bill would supposedly continue to provide support for public, educational and governmental (“PEG”) access channels and institutional networks (I-Nets).

  The Truth: It fails to make communities whole on PEG and I-Net support. Many communities have made the decision in their local franchises to obtain more than 1 percent worth of PEG and I-Net support, and in those communities, local programming and emergency communications should not be diminished by the bill.