STATES PUT TRIENNIAL REVIEW PROCEDURAL PLANS INTO ACTION

The states have been coordinating their efforts nationally through the Triennial Review Implementation Process (TRIP) Task Force set up under NARUC auspices shortly after the FCC’s Feb. 20 announcement of the decision. An early step was to set up a cadre of roughly 2 dozen regulatory staffers around the country who each will be getting a portion of the order in the next day or 2 to read and summarize. After being verified for accuracy, these papers will be combined into a single summary that project organizers hope to start distributing to all 50 states during the first week of Sept.

Most of the regional regulatory conferences have set up their own staff cadres to review the FCC order, looking for region-specific issues the states should address as a group. The TRIP task force for the last 3 months has been circulating decision point lists among major stakeholder groups, inviting them to specify the substantive concerns and issues that the states will need to address in their UNE market analyses. And now that the order is out, the TRIP group will serve as a central point of contact for states to coordinate their efforts to address UNE issues arising from the Triennial Review, officials said.

Without advance preparation, the states would have been hard pressed to address the unbundling issues referred to them by the FCC within the tight timelines established by the order, officials said. Release of the long-awaited order “doesn’t spell relief to me,” said Md. PSC Comr. Gail McDonald, pres. of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Regulatory Utility Comrs. (MACRUC): “We're being given much to do and very little time to do it.”

The FCC order gives the states just 90 days from the order’s effective date to rebut the FCC’s presumption that unbundled switching and UNE-P aren’t necessary for local competition in the big-business market segment where customers use circuits at the 1.5 Mbps DS-1 rate and above. The states will get 9 months from the effective date to conduct a granular analysis of whether unbundled local switching and UNE-P are necessary for local competition in each state. That’s when states will determine whether the hot-cut processes for switching loops from one local carrier to another are sufficiently mature to do away with UNE-P.

The order will take effect 30 days after its official publication in the Federal Register. State sources said they expect to see the order in the Register early next week since the vast majority of the normal work to prepare this order for publication will already have been done. If the official publication is next week as expected, the states will have to conclude their work on UNE-P for big businesses by Christmas, and their analysis of UNE-P for the mass market by late June, 2004.

Comr. Connie Hughes of the N.J. Board of Public Utilities, who’s heading MACRUC’s regional coordination effort, said: “My stomach will do a flip-flop first, and then we'll get down to work.” She said the MACRUC states had planned a special meeting Sept. 4 in Philadelphia to address energy issues. But she said that with the FCC order now out, the states probably would carve out time to discuss Triennial Review implications. She said the states will be striving to coordinate their discovery and hearing schedules and standardize discovery to the fullest extent possible.

S.C. PSC Chmn. Mignon Clyburn, pres. of the Southeastern Assn. of Regulatory Utility Comrs. (SEARUC), said she expected the major-market states like Fla. or Ga. to take the lead in the SEARUC region in doing the required market analyses. She said the SEARUC states have a long history of regional dialog that should stand them in good stead in identifying issues that can be addressed across multiple states. Clyburn said she expected most issues to be state- specific but that the SEARUC states are ready to coordinate their procedural schedules as far as possible to ensure that people don’t have to be in 2 places at once.

The Qwest Regional Oversight Committee (ROC) has a teleconference planned for next week to discuss coordination of Triennial Review-related hearing schedules and discovery requests among the 14 states of the Qwest region. Organizers said that since the same parties will be involved in multiple proceedings across the Qwest region, it’s important for the states to avoid procedural conflicts as much as possible. The Qwest ROC also plans a workshop during its biannual meeting Sept. 28-29 in Seattle to dissect the FCC order and coordinate the state reviews.

Mich. PSC Comr. Bob Nelson, who is heading multistate coordination efforts among the 5 Great Lakes states of the former Ameritech region, said the states had planned a conference call for Aug. 25 to discuss procedural coordination. He said that with the order in hand, the states will be better able to determine if region-wide issues exist and how to coordinate their efforts.

R.I. PUC Chmn. Elia Germani, pres. of the New England Conference of Public Utilities Comrs. (NECPUC), said the New England states haven’t developed any plans for addressing the Triennial Review order on a regional basis. He said the consensus among the NECPUC states was that the Triennial Review’s issues would be specific to each state and that there wouldn’t be any significant region-wide issues. He said individual NECPUC states would be participating in the TRIP task force’s communication and information-sharing networks.

Several individual states have set up their own Triennial Review dockets that now will move to action. For example, the N.Y. PSC has asked all interested parties to submit within 2 weeks their written comments on the scope, nature and timing of the PSC’s Triennial Review proceeding (Case 03-C-0821). The PSC called for a meeting of all parties a week after the comments are filed to further discuss procedural questions.