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Home My WebLink About19920904.docx Minutes of Decision Meeting September 4, 1992 - 10:00 a.m. In attendance were: Commissioners Marsha H. Smith, Joe Miller and Ralph Nelson and staff members Mike Gilmore, Beverly Barker, Belinda Anderson, Eileen Benner, Don Howell, Jim Long, Tonya Clark, Syd Lansing, Gary Richardson, Birdelle Brown, Terri Carlock and Myrna Walters. Also in attendance were Walt Sorg, Fred Logan and Karl Shurtliff for GTE and Ron Lightfoot from U. S. West. Commissioner Smith said the first item is discussion on the Val Brown Complaint, held from previous decision meeting because Beverly Barker was not there. Asked Beverly Barker what she was encouraging the Commission to do - open a rulemaking case? Beverly Barker said she was trying to give the Commissioners the kind of information supplied to people when they are subject to disconnection. Her understanding was that Belinda Anderson's recommendaiton was dealing with essential service definition and dealing with allocation formula. Guess there was some discussion on whether the definition of disputed is part of the problem. Don't really think so. The problem is what telephone companies think are disputed billings and what customers think are disputed. Commissioner Smith asked - does this occur with other phone companies or just U. S. West? Beverly Barker said most Commission gets involved in are U. S. West's. Small companies deal with them differently. Commissioner Nelson asked - why is that a rule problem? If small companies deal with it? Belinda Anderson said they have a very close association with their customers; attitude that keeping every single person on the phone system is critical. Like the close relationship. Beverly Barker said the agreements between other local exchange carriers and their MTS companies (primarily AT&T) - things get worked out fairly well. Most of the problems originate with OSPs, payphones, 1-800, 900, etc. Commissioner Nelson asked - why wouldn't those all be in proportion? Why wouldn't a small company have the same proportion as large companies? -2- Beverly Barker said - people don't have to come to the Commission to get resolution. Commissioner Nelson commented - that is why he was wondering if it is a generic problem. Beverly Barker said where disconnection comes into play, the larger companies have more formalized responses. Mike Gilmore said the small companies only consider themselves one company. Large companies consider both their customers. Commissioner Smith asked - do you see the solution to this as just forget allocation and have priority system, so there is never a question when someone pays a small amount. Wonder what the counter balancing would be of the other companies? Beverly Barker said we did propose the allocation procedure initially. Primarily U. S. West argued that allocating to local service first would devalue their billing and collecting contracts with other customers because they wouldn't get their chunk of the money. Also they made the argument that a lot of people who wouldn't pay, don't really have disputes, they pay $50 toward the bill and don't really care where it goes. So basically the Commission decided on the current allocation system. Mike Gilmore said at that time it wasn't technically feasible to do this. There has been that technology change since the rule was ironed out. Commissioner Miller said he didn't want to make this more difficult than it is, but has become reluctant to open broad rulemaking cases unless the Commissioners have clear view of how it might go. It might result in rules that come back to us that Commissioners don't understand would come back to us. Seemed to him the better approach, rather than opening rulemaking, would be to have staff put together what their proposal for the change is. We could then at least make a preliminary review of that and see if there is enough justification in it to put it out as a proposed rule. Would like to see what we are looking at in change of scope of rules. Would prefer that. Commissioner Smith suggested: perhaps staff could get together with the utilities and see if this could happen. Commissioner Miller said - or if staff wants to get a proposal on the table to get out for comment, then we could decide if rulemaking is necessary. -3- Belinda Anderson said - there could be a domino effect. Beverly Barker asked if it would be helpful for the Commissioners to look at actual cases, or are Commissioners just interested in how the outcome of the rule would be? Commissioner Smith said she needed to see that upfront. Commissioner Nelson said he guessed he looked at this disconnect notice and it wouldn't encourage customers to make contact. Thought there was very poor wording. Beverly Barker said part of the problem is the agreements with the providers. Commissioner Nelson said it is a company-specific problem, not a generic case. Eileen Benner said staff thinks a stronger interpretative message or stronger rule is the question. See what the Commissioners are saying, we have tried to get the company to do something different. Decision was: Staff is to do a draft. 2. Bob Smith's August 28, 1992 Decision Memorandum re: Century Tel. letter of Aug. 10th requesting authorization to reverse incorrect 1991 depreciation in 1992. Commissioner Miler said he circled answer No. 1. (Approve the request with a clarification of the corrected complete account numbers). Other Commissioners agreed. 3. Belinda Anderson's September 2, 1992 Deciison Memorandum re: GTE(Contel of the West) Tariff 92-06 requesting the deletion of the minimum monthly charge for switched access. Approved. 4. Transfer of Contel's Idaho Certificate of Convenience and Necessity to GTE Northwest - Case No. GTE-T-92-6. Don Howell said both companies have a continuing obligation to operate in the public interest. The companies were going to realize administrative savings. What it means to Idaho hasn't been indicated to anybody. Questions are: -4- Are you going to merge the tariffs, are you going to operate as one company, etc.? They want the transfer to be effective January 1. If you want to make those inquires, you can. Commissioner Smith said the customers in previous Contel service area ought not to see any degradation of service to be provided or plant to be provided. Seems that they were in the midst of upgrades, need to be informed of OPUS and upgrade plans. Concern is that customers not be negatively impacted. Don't want the customers affected by the change. Eileen Benner said staff has noticed that the upgrades have not take place recently. Contel gave staff upgrade estimates through 1991 and then in 1989 had later conversation with engineer in Homedale and got updated schedule. She read the list of upgrades. Slated for 1991 were Homedale, etc., 1992 was Fairfield - end of 91 or 92 conversions have taken place. All upgrades are on hold and nothing is scheduled for the future. We did have that schedule and non have been proceeded with. In 1985 Contel requested approval to grandfather multi-party service. They also said they would have to hook up some with 4 parties but would convert as soon as possible. There has never been any forced upgrade to one party, but company was campaigning for upgrades. In late 1989 they gave staff that one party number and said they were continuing to upgrade outside plant for OPUS whenever customers were ready to convert. Had fiber between those communities. Said it was just her perception, but it seems like outside plant and improvements have not proceeded since 89/90 timeframe. Fred Logan of GTE responded. Said as far as switch conversions, those are under evaluation. Did have central office engineers over yesterday to re-evaluate the budgets for GTE and Contel properties. Don't have final outcome yet. On OPUS, it is just standard policy. Believe that has been followed for Contel as well. The other area, the questions in Mr. Howell's report, are intent on merging the operations of the company. Will keep separate tariffs. There are major benefits that we do have for Idaho. 1.1 million benefits. Do have offsets. That is why those issues are being addressed. (1) Conditions on OPUS, etc. Have 8 EAS items on the ticket. There are a lot of unknowns, that is why we have not done a lot with the tariffs at this time. Will keep submitting reports. Commissioner Miller said his thought is somewhere along the lines of Commissioner Smith. Need to have a process for continuing dialog so we can be satisfied that service in the previous Contel areas is not going backward. Need to -5- satisfy ourselves that appropriate investment commitments are being made for the Contel area and there are rate questions that need to be addressed with Contel so think it is going to take the company's commitment to be sure that they are acting the way we can be satisfied on those points. Am not sure the certificate case is the right time to specifically address that. As he read this statute, it seems to give telephone companies the absolute right to make these transactions. The statute where we could make these inquiries, if someone would like more time to tell us we don't have conditional authority. Don't think we ought to act beyond our legal authority as place to obtain commitments. Need to be fair in the administration of that. These issues are important to him and need to be addressed somewhere but this isn't the place. Don Howell said 62-704 was adopted from the California statute. We don't have the same kind of authority as we have over electric utilities. Could do more research, spoke to the provisions of conditioning certificates. Mike Gilmore said what the Commission did with 61-526, this is the standard in the Telecommunications Act. Commissioner Smith said 704 seems to be pretty clear. How does that fit with 61-526? Would hope that it would be academic if the Company was open to our concerns. Walt Sorg said he thought the Company wanted to respond. Would like to present Company plans. Think this is part of the on-going process.. Commissioner Smith said she ultimately felt that based on the authority the Commission has, feel confident that we have adequate authority to require what we feel should be changed. So, would like to grant the transfer. Commissioner Miller said he would like to start on the right foot with this. Commissioner Smith asked Don Howell about consolidating the certificate. Don Howell responded. -6- Commissioner Smith said she thought that was probably a good suggestion. Sounds like this is a project for staff and company to work on. Decision meeting adjourned. Dated at Boise, Idaho, this 5th day of November, 1992. Myrna J. Walters Commission Secretary mjw 0122M