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Critics urge caution on alleged “jobs bills”

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Illinois

* The Illinois Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill last month that effectively deletes a decades-old moratorium on new nuclear power plants. Proponents said the legislation would create new jobs and help Illinois capture bigtime federal money. Opponents aren’t so sure…

“Everybody can create all these imaginary ‘horribles,’ ” said state Sen. Mike Jacobs, D-East Moline, who has sponsored legislation to allow new plants in the state. “We should be thinking about how we can ensure that Illinois, with its leadership in nuclear power, keeps that.”

But opponents worry that the state, already home to the nation’s highest nuclear capacity, would become a natural destination for nuclear waste from other parts of the country if more plants are added.

“There shouldn’t be any more new ones until you’ve dealt with the waste from the old ones,” said Dave Kraft, director of the Nuclear Energy Information Service, a nuclear power watchdog group in Chicago. The ban, Kraft noted, “was put in place to protect us from becoming a de facto nuclear waste dump. … The (ban) has done its job.”

The feds just awarded $8 billion to help a new nuclear plant get going in Georgia and is looking at 12 more sites. Jacobs’ bill would put Illinois in the running for those federal subsidies. Interestingly enough, Sen. Jacobs claimed that the need for subsidies was one reason he opposed wind power legislation…

A bill that extends for 5 years a preference for Illinois wind has stalled in the General Assembly’s Energy Committee, headed by Sen. Mike Jacobs, D-East Moline. Jacobs says electricity customers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize an industry that can’t stand on its own.

“I’m not anti-wind, … but the industry can’t survive without subsidies,” Jacobs said. “There’s plenty of room for everybody. If the wind farms make sense, then build it.”

* A massive jobs and technology bill or a consumer ripoff that will provide an excuse not to upgrade the state’s communications networks? Those are the questions being posed by AT&T’s push to throw off state laws that have required it to invest big money into its landline network. The rewrite of the state’s Telecommunications Act has been put off for several years, but now AT&T is pushing hard for changes this session.

Progress Illinois has a pretty good look today at what’s at stake. AT&T points out that cellphones, Voice Over Internet Protocol, cable companies, etc. have sharply reduced the need for landlines. A quarter of households don’t even have landlines today, but state law still requires big investments in that “legacy” technology…

According to AT&T, the Telecommunication Act’s quality control standards require local phone carriers like themselves to make investments in older technologies when they would rather spend that money on new digital or wireless infrastructure.

These “legacy regulations” (as the Illinois Technology Partnership calls them) also deter burgeoning tech companies from entering the local market. A study commissioned by the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and some of its allies estimates that easing regulations across the board would create or save 105,622 jobs while boosting what ITP’s Lindsay Mosher calls “consumer choice” and helping to ease the state’s persistent digital divide.

Consumer groups are urging more caution. For starters, they argue that the landline quality control standards are in the public interest, particularly for vulnerable Illinois residents — namely the poor and elderly — who aren’t yet linked into the digital world and still face a limited choice of providers.

The consumer advocates also challenge the notion that complete deregulation of the telecom network — which ITP is basically pushing for (PDF) — will automatically create jobs. “AT&T has tried to pitch this as a jobs bill,” says Citizen Utility Board Executive Director David Kolata. “I think this is Orwellian at best.” Indeed, during testimony yesterday at a joint hearing down in Springfield, AT&T Illinois President Paul LaSchiazza could not specify how many jobs would be created if his favored regulatory reforms were enacted.

On the issue of jobs, Kolata provides a contrary perspective. He says that when the General Assembly mandated that AT&T follow standards for their landline systems, the company was given a financial incentive to hire more workers to maintain that system. Service improved, too.

CUB thinks the state ought to update current law and broaden it to include investment requirements in new technologies. Without that requirement, some feel that AT&T won’t have any real incentives to put the bucks into the systems.

AT&T is holding a Statehouse press conference today to unveil its plan and push for passage. From a press release…

The Illinois Chamber, Chicagoland Chamber, and more than 30 additional Chambers call to modernize Illinois’ outdated telecommunications laws in order to create jobs and attract economic investment to fuel Illinois economy.

* Perhaps the most important player in all this is the attorney general. Without her OK, it’s doubtful that Speaker Madigan will move the legislation ahead. At the moment, the AG’s office isn’t exactly thrilled with the AT&T plan…

Illinois does not regulate either cells phones or the Internet. The law being proposed, with backing from AT&T, would focus on land lines and service.

Susan Satter with the Illinois Attorney General’s Office said that’s the problem. She said loosening regulations could allow telephone companies to essentially abandon customers who don’t want to buy higher-priced cell phone/Internet bundles while also charging them more.

Satter told lawmakers there is a need to update Illinois’ telecom law, but not at the expense of nearly 40 percent of customers across the state.

“I think we can get to where we want to get to, in terms of modernizing, without so radically the structure.”

The proposed re-write does include protections for land line only customers, and requires phone companies to continue service to those customers. But Satter fears other changes would allow the companies to offer poorer service.

* And the governor isn’t fully on board as of yet…

Gov. Pat Quinn said his goal is to help negotiate a proposal that improves service but also helps boost investment in telecommunications.

“We want to have more jobs in telecommunications and we have to make sure we protect consumers,” Quinn said.

* Related…

* Quinn signs tax credit for new hires at small businesses

* Quinn approves tax credit for small businesses that add employees

* Quinn signs tax credit for small businesses

posted by Rich Miller
Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 11:24 am

Comments

Cell tower regulation of some form would help. Went to a local neighborhood meeting where a cell tower was being proposed. It would be built a few hundred feet away from an existing one. Why? AT&T and Sprint own the existing one and won’t let competitors slap on transmitters (or whichamajiggers, the tech stuff is over my head) to the existing tower, so thus, the demand for another tower.

Everyone in my area keeps losing their cell signals except for the ones subscribing to AT&T and Sprint.

Found out with cell phone towers and technology, its still the wild west out there when it comes to regulation.

Comment by Louis G. Atsaves Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 11:35 am
At a Highland Park forum, Sen. Susan Garrett said Jacobs got the nuclear power bill through the Illinois Senate by misrepresenting what was in the bill. See Ellen Gill.

Comment by Carl Nyberg Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 11:38 am
I’m in favor of going forward with new nuclear plants. You can’t have energy without a degree of risk, as the coal miners can tell you. The safety record in Illinois has been good. I consider my third eye just a step in my evolution.

Isn’t ComEd due to decommission some current plants? They’ve been charging customers month after month, year and year, for funds to do so.

Comment by wordslinger Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 11:40 am
Oh Come-on!
Which century are we living in people? Why is the state government demanding that one of their regulated corporation continue rebuilding 20th Century technologies when everyone is leaving it behind in the 21st Century.

This is absolutely crazy! Who is worried about losing land lines here, the telecommunications industry or the State of Illinois who regulates the land lines?

Yeah - if we move forward, we should be considering what is needed regrading overview of mobile telecommunication and the Internet. But isn’t that one of the reasons these new media is thriving - no costly governmental oversight with resultant lower prices?

If we move forward, those who love government regulations should also move forward. Forcing regulated corporations to re-invest in 20th Century technologies in order to keep regulating them seems too Orwellian to be believed.

And Illinois is nuclear power. Or was. Want to lead this industry anymore? Then stop hobbling it. We’ve been worrying about nuclear waste a lifetime without making any decisions about it. It is time to stop hobbling it, open Yucca Mountain, and move on!

Comment by VanillaMan Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 11:41 am
The bill status lists some “No” and “Present” votes, so it wasn’t on an agreed bill list, as Garrett claimed.

Comment by Rich Miller Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 11:50 am
Do these politicians listen to themselves? He voted against wind power because he claimed it needs subsidies and he’s voting for and writing legislation for nuclear power so that we can get subsidies that it needs.

Comment by Angry Chicagoan Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 11:51 am
VM, maybe if Harry Reid is voted out of the Senate can Yucca Mountain open - otherwise it is a no/go. We should be using breeder reactors to make use of the abundant energy leftover from first use reactors that are in place today. After much re-refining and reusing, the nuclear wasted has a much less toxic half-life as opposed to what we are seeing now. All that was stopped due to our loopy pres Jimmy Carter decision to ban the breeder reactors. A decision that reverberates to this day.

Illinois could be a leader in nuclear power technonology if it wanted to but I ain’t holding my breath on that one.

Comment by dupage dan Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 12:41 pm
Wind power - won’t work. It is interesting to see the competing environmentalists as they fight over this technology. One side says it will make us independent of arab oil (forgetting that little US electric energy is generated using oil) and the other screams that it will kill all the birds (maybe just the dumb ones?).

Anybody care to check on how much land would be needed to support the windmills necessary to provide power to Chicago?

There is a good reason not to subsidize wind power. It is merely window dressing. Not viable on the scale necessary to take a significant bite out of our energy needs. Unless we move back into caves.

Comment by dupage dan Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 12:46 pm
The nuclear industry has been propped up by tens of billions of dollars of government subsidies over the decades. Nuclear power still can’t stand on its own two feet. I think we could get far more out of our money by investing in efficiency improvements, conversation and innovative technologies that generate power from solar, wind, biomass and waste heat from industry.

Comment by Going nuclear Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 12:54 pm
Not in favor of removing consumer protections on ATT. The last time they blew thru Springfield, showering money everywhere, they got a telecom bill passed that took them off the hook for supporting and delivering local access programming to any town using their Uverse cable-competing TV service. The cable companies still have to delver that locally-originated programming, how is that fair to the cable companies OR the U-verse audiences who now can’t see their own town council meetings?

Now ATT says: “we can’t concentrate on giving good service with the threat of a $30m fine looming over us for failure. Take away the one thing that we fear the most, and we’ll continue to provide good service, just as if that protection was still there.”

Yeah, right, and my teenaged kid says he would be a better driver but for all those pesky and distracting traffic regulations. Come ON, this is ATT we are talking about. Do we have to repeat 30-odd years of history AGAIN?

Comment by Gregor Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 1:00 pm
I pretty much stop reading any time Kraft’s name comes up anymore; his anti-nuke group still thinks this is the 70’s.

Illinois should be leading a nuclear power renaissance. We have a number of plants nearing their retirement age and we don’t have replacements under way. We don’t want them replaced with coal or with imported natural gas. Solar and wind are good and we want them, but they are not enough to cover the gap. The new reactor technology is very safe; plants really CAN be built now to be melt-down proof.
Look up High Temp Gas-Cooled and “Generation 3 and 4″ reactors for more detail.

The waste issue can be dealt with. We can glassify waste, baking it into a solid, glasslike rock material, a block that just sits there, not leaking anything. You can safely stack those blocks at Yucca, or you can take them to the spot in the deep ocean where the continental plates meet, and drop the blocks into the subduction zone, where they sink back down into the Earth’s core. But I like the idea of re-cycling the spent fuel in breeder reactors because you get more free energy out of material you’ve already refined once. And every time you re-process it, that fuel’s half-life gets shortened, to the point where the nastiest stuff has a half-life shorter than one person’s lifetime, and we DO have adequate container technology to hold something like that quite safely.

Comment by Techboy Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 1:11 pm
=== Not in favor of removing consumer protections on ATT. The last time they blew thru Springfield, showering money everywhere, they got a telecom bill passed that took them off the hook for supporting and delivering local access programming to any town using their Uverse cable-competing TV service. ===

Um, that’s simply a lie.

The video bill requires ALL providers in Illinois to carry local PEG programming.

Moreover, it was supported by Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

Get yer facts straight.

I find myself in rare agreement with Vanillaman on this issue.

The system we have today is akin to state government telling Dunkin Donuts that every customer who walks in the door and orders a cup of Joe must get their coffee in 60 seconds, and Dunkin Donuts can only charge 99 cents for coffee so that its affordable to everyone.

That forces Dunkin Donuts to invest all of its money and staff into serving regular joe, which means that they have fewer staff to serve other customers AND those customers end up paying more for their latte to subsidize the coffee drinkers.

The end result is that anyone who wants a latte just walks next door to Starbucks…who, by the way, only has to offer marginally better lattes marginally faster at a marginally better price, because Dunkin Donuts is handicapped in the competition.

It’s Economics 101, and everybody loses.

P.S. If the AG and CUB think they can pass legislation over-regulating cell phones (which now include Google), voice-over-internet (Skype), and cable telephony (Comcast) just as we over-regulate AT&T and Verizon, I wish them the best of luck. That “solution” is dead on arrival, not just because the lobbying power of those groups, but also because — unless someone wants to correct me — the state of Illinois has absolutely no jurisdiction over how those providers set their rates. If we did, we would have capped cable t.v. rates 30 years ago.

Comment by Yellow Dog Democrat Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 3:18 pm
“Isn’t ComEd due to decommission some current plants? They’ve been charging customers month after month, year and year, for funds to do so.”

Unlikely Excelon will decommission any of their existing nukes any time soon. In fact, probably should expect new applications for extensions for LaSalle Station and Quad Cities over the next few years. They are both pretty valuable facilities.

Dresden 2 & Dresden 3 both have already been extended for an additional 20 years (”In October 2004, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission renewed the operating licenses for both units for an additional 20 years, extending them to 2030 and 2031.”).

Unlikely to see any of the existing nuclear facilities here in IL decomissioned anytime soon.

Comment by Judgment Day Is On The Way Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 5:53 pm
Glad people are seeing through AT&T’s claim that this is a jobs bill. Nothing in the bill says anything about how they would create or how many jobs would be created. It’s such a joke.
“Jobs” is obviously the best way to sell a piece of crap this year in the GA. Gross.

Comment by dupage progressive Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 6:05 pm
There’s a bigger set of problems with the wind farms. First off, rights to electric power are purchased based upon production estimates from all the power generators. If the next day rolls around and the power generators can’t provide the power (for whatever reason), there’s fines and costs the power producers have to pay.

Currently, I’m not sure this applies to the wind based power generators here in IL, but it does apply to everybody else.

Down in Texas (where they have the most wind power generation in the US), the playing field’s is not totally level (everybody else either meets their production promises or pays fines, but the wind power guys get a pass). This becomes a REAL PROBLEM if all the sudden you come up 1,000 Mw. short due to the wind farms not producing up to expectations (Btw, this situation has actually happened down in Texas).

Secondly, moving the power from the wind farms to the urban areas is going to become an increasing problem. We’re not adding more power transmission capacity, so there’s limits. If you give wind based power generation priority over transmission lines, it means other non-wind based power producers have to go from a production mode down to a standby mode.

Won’t affect the nukes, because we’ve got to keep those units up & going to keep the load (power demand) balanced. But if it means that a coal fired unit has to go to standby, well those wind turbines better come through and spin their little hearts out, because otherwise we’re going to come up short on electricity and several things can occur (buying very expensive short term power at big time costs, kicking big industrial users off, or even power browouts/blackouts). Pick your poison.

You don’t just turn a couple of switches and either the nuclear or coal fired generating facilities come up and running in a blink. Takes a little longer than that.

There’s lots of things I don’t like about Excelon, but IMO, on this set of issues their concerns are valid.

Comment by Judgment Day Is On The Way Wednesday, Apr 14, 10 @ 6:12 pm
The only reason AT&T has a significant workforce today is because of the strict service quality standards and a $30 million penalty that they face for not meeting these standards. Once we remove the service quality standards, there is no incentive to retain so many jobs.

The question is, what will happen to the $$$ that AT&T saves from terminating these positions? Will they invest in Illinois or retain them as corporate profits?

Instead of watering down current law to bring AT&T to Comcast’s level, we should be regulating Comcast and wireless companies so that they are on AT&T’s level, which we are allowed to do under federal law.

Comment by City Slicker Thursday, Apr 15, 10 @ 12:30 am
By “regulating Comcast and wireless companies”, I mean regulating their terms and conditions, not the rates.

Comment by City Slicker Thursday, Apr 15, 10 @ 12:32 am
Susan Garrett’s office clarified her comments at the March town hall meeting wherein she explained her vote on the nuclear power plant construction bill. It will be up on my blog tomorrow.

Comment by Ellen Beth Gill Thursday, Apr 15, 10 @ 8:00 pm