NASHVILLE – With the Haslam administration expected to release a long-awaited assessment of Tennesseans’ internet broadband access and usage next week, a top Senate Republican says a panel he heads will issue its own report this fall on extending availability “without expanding the size of state government.”
In his letter sent to fellow legislators Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris, R-Collierville, said the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations that he chairs will adopt its own report with a preliminary draft presented this fall in a public meeting.
The state Department of Economic and Community Development’s assessment will be “incorporated” into TACIR’s final report, said Norris, who expects it to be presented to lawmakers in January.
“One of our goals is to help define the appropriate role of government at all levels in private sector deployment, including measures to guard against inadvertent interference with it,” Norris wrote.
ECD Commissioner Randy Boyd announced the assessment in January.
Norris’ announcement and Boyd’s assessment come against the expected renewed political struggle in the 2017 Legislature by Chattanooga-based EPB and other municipally owned electric services.
The municipal services have fought for years to extend their fast-speed broadband offerings outside their footprint to areas they say are unserved or underserved by for-profit providers like AT&T and Comcast.
But the telecommunications giants and smaller providers say its unfair for government entities to compete against them. They say the municipal providers are interested mostly in “cherry picking” customers.
“We anticipate releasing the final report on Tuesday,” said Boyd spokeswoman Jennifer McEachern. “At present, there is no administration plan on broadband.”
She said the department “commissioned a study from consultants to answer questions about the state of broadband in Tennessee. We will take that study under advisement.”
Currently, the state of Tennessee is challenging in the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals a 2015 Federal Communications Commission ruling allowing Chattanooga’s Electric Power Board and similar entities to extend broadband outside their areas. The FCC said municipal providers’ efforts to expand were being stymied by politically powerful providers.
In February, Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, bluntly called AT&T a “villain” at a state Capitol rally by business owners and others, many of them from Southeast Tennessee.
Boyd in January announced the state was hiring a firm to conduct a statewide assessment of broadband access and usage in Tennessee. He said his statewide listening tour found elected leaders, business executives and economic professionals in all nine of the department’s development regions worrying a lack of broadband may hurt future development efforts in rural Tennessee.
In his letter to lawmakers, Norris said in TACIR’s “methodical, in-depth investigation so thus far, we have learned about extensive investment in broadband by the private sector – companies of all sizes – and important plans underway to accelerate that deployment in Tennessee.”
Contact staff writer Andy Sher at asher@timesfreepress.com or 615-255-0550. Follow on Twitter @AndySher1.