NARUC Telecom Panel Clears ICS Rates, Outages Resolutions

NARUC’s Telecom Committee supported lowering phone rates for the incarcerated and asking the FCC to share network outage reporting system (NORS) information with states. At the NARUC virtual annual conference Tuesday, the panel also created a subcommittee on states' eligible telecom carrier authority, as expected (see 2011050051). The committee tweaked the inmate calling service resolution to appease some members’ concerns about lobbying legislatures. A day earlier, ICS providers differed on whether and how the California Public Utilities Commission should regulate intrastate rates.

NARUC would urge state legislatures to authorize commissions to reduce intrastate ICS rates to cost-based prices under the draft resolution by outgoing NARUC President Brandon Presley. It would urge action by commissions with authority. The FCC and NARUC earlier urged gubernatorial intervention (see 2009220051).

The ICS resolution ran into trouble when Ohio Public Utilities Commissioner Dan Conway and other committee members voiced discomfort with lobbying state legislators. Conway said he would abstain from voting even though he supports reducing ICS rates and Ohio legislators earlier gave his agency jurisdiction to act. “We don’t lobby our own legislature for legislation,” and Conway feels “some reluctance and misgiving about advising other state legislatures what they ought to be doing.” After South Dakota Public Utilities Commissioner Chris Nelson and incoming NARUC President Paul Kjellander of the Idaho PUC sympathized with those concerns, Presley withdrew the resolution.

The committee later returned to pass the draft resolution with an amendment by Nelson changing the wording. The original said NARUC “encourages” legislatures and commissions; the revised version would have state regulators “draw attention to” the matter, Presley emailed us afterward. “The goal was to call attention to this issue and therefore I accepted the amendment and it passed unanimously.” Conway told us later that Nelson's amendment addressed his concern and he voted yes.

NARUC will leave it to individual legislatures and commissions to decide what is a cost-based rate, Presley responded earlier in the meeting to a question by Nelson. The South Dakota commissioner agreed that’s the right approach because it “gives each state the ability to determine what's appropriate.” Nelson noted county sheriffs use ICS revenue for security, personnel and to provide prisoners benefits including magazine subscriptions and recreational equipment.

NARUC’s telecom panel unanimously supported the NORS draft resolution, which echoed a 2015 NARUC resolution urging the FCC to grant a 2009 CPUC petition (see 2010300038). Commissions are seeing more 911 outages but “still do not have access to the data,” said committee Chair Karen Charles Peterson at the videoconferenced business meeting. “This data is critical ... and we would like to know exactly what providers know.”

The CPUC opened an ICS rulemaking last month (see 2010090014). The agency received comments Monday in docket R.20-10-002.

Existing rules offer transparency, quality of service and oversight, so rely on "competition, not new or expanded regulation,” commented ICS provider GlobalTel*Link. "Correctional facilities rates and charges reflect a complex balance between funding the deployment of advanced communications and security technologies; the specific needs of individual correctional facilities, according to factors such as population size, site geography, and institutional security concerns; governing body policies and budgets; and the ability of technically capable and sufficient capable providers to afford inmates and their families and friends with reliable communications services,” GTL said.

Securus and Inmate Calling Solutions support using the FCC framework for interstate ICS as a model. ICS took no position on whether the CPUC should step in, but Securus wants to collaborate to ensure rates are “just and reasonable,” and “endeavors to reduce costs, where possible.” It cautioned, "So as to ensure no consumer communities are left without provision of services, any end user rates for ICS must be sufficient for providers to recover the costs of service with a reasonable return on capital, while maintaining standards of affordability.”

“Research shows that 1 in 3 families with incarcerated loved ones go into debt due to the costs of phone calls and visits,” commented reentry advocates Root and Rebound. “The cost of keeping in touch with incarcerated people falls most heavily on their families, and disproportionately on low-income women of color, who often assume primary and sole caregiving responsibilities of children and senior family members when their loved one is in prison or jail."

The CPUC should set rate caps on intrastate ICS rates “to the maximum extent of its jurisdiction,” commented the Center for Accessible Technology. “Competition that allows the consumers who actually pay the bills to choose their own provider may be a valuable tool for the Commission to consider in efforts to lower prices charged to incarcerated people and their families.” COVID-19 disproportionately affects incarcerated people, noted the CPUC’s Public Advocates Office..