This commentary is by Stephen Whitaker of Montpelier, an author who has worked for 30 years on integrating planning, government transparency and accountability, public records access and more recently utility networks resiliency.
Vermont is already into spending the second $100 million of what will surely be $400 million or $500 million to be invested in fiber broadband service — yet this massive expenditure will still not meet the statutory goal of fiber-speed broadband to every address by the end of 2024, due to lack of statutorily-required planning.
This farce continues with no statewide fiber plan, no storm-hardening resiliency architecture or a keep-alive strategy, or any inventory of existing ratepayer or publicly funded fiber already built.
The State Telecommunications Plan, required under Vermont law 30 V.S.A. § 202d, should address broadband — both wireless and fiber, public safety radio, cellphone coverage, and essential reliability and resiliency measures.
Unfortunately, and now it has reached a critical stage, the Department of Public Service’s Ten Year Telecommunications Plan has repeatedly, flagrantly ignored these statutory requirements while the governor and the legislative oversight committees turn a blind eye.
Just last year, $475,000 was squandered on a telecommunications plan that fails to meet the statute requirements on nearly every count. The statutory policy and goals found in 30 V.S.A. § 202c require a plan that lays out specific strategies to support cell coverage along all highways and in villages, resilience and reliability, fiber-speed broadband everywhere by 2024, affordability, consumer choice of competitive services, and open access infrastructure for use by competitors, among other requirements.
The Enhanced 911 Board — for years lacking a board member required by statute to be appointed by the Vermont League of Cities and Towns — continues to ignore the fact that the accelerating conversion of telephone service from copper landlines to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) delivered over broadband service is resulting in phone services that are not nearly as reliable or resilient as the prior wireline service, and that any number of power outages or fiber breaks can and do prevent 911 calls from being completed. People will die.
The Enhanced 911 Board, the Public Service Department and the Public Utility Commission are also all ignoring the need for “Continuing Emergency Access” service that landline phones are required to maintain, or keep alive while apartments and houses change occupants.
This is no longer required for VoIP, or even being discussed in the reckless, unplanned fiber pursuits absent a statewide strategy. Nor has there been any analysis of which communities lack cell coverage and at the same time suffer frequent power outages of long duration. This information is needed to support prioritization of resiliency measures.
The governor has now made a proposal to spend another $51 million on enhancing cell coverage, literally giving the money away to private, for-profit tower-owning companies and cellphone carriers when we still have no statewide cell coverage mapping completed, and no strategy is in place to assure the new cell coverage will be economically engineered to provide “neutral host” service from all major carriers anywhere that public funds are invested.
Nor does the $51 million (lack of a) cell coverage plan assure that emerging autonomous vehicles connectivity needs are prioritized along all major highways, that voice 911 calls can be completed from anywhere, or that public safety officials will be assured priority and preemption cell services regardless of carrier selection, or even that the investments will be engineered to survive major ice storms and hurricanes.
Yet we’ve also learned that the governor and the public safety commissioner propose to spend an additional $11 million to $14 million on building or upgrading regional public safety dispatching centers, radio coverage and 911 call-answering capacity, yet with no long-term funding source identified for supporting these dispatch centers going forward, no plan to integrate expenditures for LMR radio and LTE cellular, both of which are required, no fiber resilience and redundancy plan, no transparent governance model, and no integration with the prior identified initiatives.
What could possibly go wrong?
Yet Gov. Scott signed Executive Order 05-19 33 months ago, in 2019, creating the Emergency Communications Advisory Council — yet still to this day he has not made any appointments to this council as a successor to the Public Safety Broadband Network Commission, which railroaded the FirstNet opt-in decision to AT&T under an entirely secret and wholly unaccountable plan and for which the state has no recourse in the courts for failure to deliver.
Meanwhile, AT&T has failed to deliver, lied about it, and the state is powerless to do anything about it while the Department of Public Safety keeps mum to save face.
And speaking of funding reliable public safety dispatch and E911, we’ve also learned that this administration is stubbornly failing to collect significant tax and fees — likely totaling hundreds of millions of dollars over so many years now, despite these laws being on the books. This is probably viewed as a favor to corporate campaign contributors or as a passive-aggressive protest to existing tax policy (which is still law).
These uncollected revenues are telephone personal property tax (32 VSA § 8521, annual 2.37% of total depreciated value of all telephone infrastructure owned) and the right-of-way fee required to be paid annually by broadband providers stringing cable and fiber in the public right of way, both railways and roads (19 V.S.A. § 26a). Yet the legislative money committees lack either the will, capacity or integrity to insist the administration go after these uncollected funds.
Should we really be giving tax breaks at the expense of the public safety?
Similarly, the grant agreements between the Department of Health Access and Vermont Information Technology Leaders, totaling probably more than $50 million as of a few years ago, required that the software Intellectual property developed with those public funds be retained and owned by the state of Vermont. Vermont Information Technology Leaders now appears to have recklessly or intentionally “lost track” of those software investments, which clearly became part of its subcontractor Medicity’s suite of software now offered to other states at a huge profit, with Medicity having since been acquired by Aetna Insurance. Yet Vermont’s attorney general stubbornly refuses to pursue reclaiming of that $50 million in intellectual property or a share of profits for its relicensing to others.
And we’re still lacking any objective report on the promises made and broken by AT&T and the FirstNet initiative to which the governor “opted in” in 2017 the day before the legislative committee was to hear informed testimony on why that might not be the best plan for Vermont, thereby forfeiting to AT&T the $25 million in National Telecommunications and Information Administration grant funds that were available for Vermont to deploy public-safety-grade cellular broadband, and forfeiting an additional $30 million in valuable 700 MHz band 14 radio spectrum authorized to be used at a higher power for transmission to longer distances.
And the Department of Public Safety has since retired the head of the Radio Technology Services Division and has not found a replacement for two years now, while the prior employee continues to rubber-stamp homeland security grant applications as being compliant with an outdated and wholly inadequate statewide interoperability plan.
Might you sense a pattern emerging here?
“Invest in Vermont — we know well how to squander money!”
