(Alexandria,VA) – Earlier this year, it appeared New Jersey was on the right path to long-overduereforms in its burdensome telecommunications regulatory regime, but thatprogress is now threatened by an alliance of special interests. That’s the wordfrom the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), a grassroots taxpayer group with 362,000members nationwide and nearly 17,000 members in the Garden State.
“Despite the fact that the Assemblyoverwhelmingly passed a strong reform bill earlier this year, the Senate hasproved to be a big obstacle to modernizing how New Jersey regulates,” said AndrewMoylan, NTU’s Vice President of Government Affairs. “The regulatory overhaulproposed by Senator Lesniak (D-Union County) has been derailed by unions andother special interests that want to keep New Jersey telecommunicationscustomers in the dark ages.”
In responseto the impasse, Senator Bob Smith (D-Middlesex County) has introduced a so-called“compromise” bill that unfortunately falls far short of the Assembly-passedlegislation. It allows for the state’s Board of Public Utilities to have a handin the process of determining rates charged to consumers and the terms of theirservice, even when a given market is deemed to be fully competitive. Many ofits provisions are relics of the bygone era of government-enforced telephoneand cable monopolies that simply do not exist in today’s economy.
“Senator Smith’s bill is not just awatered-down reform proposal, it ends up being mostly water. The whole purposeof regulatory reform is to remove harmful barriers, especially in services thatare subject to vibrant competition, but Senator Smith’s bill either doesnothing to remove those barriers or in some cases builds them even higher,”Moylan noted.
“New Jersey is the state where muchof technological foundation for the telecommunications industry was originally inventedand built,” Moylan concluded. “The time has come for the State Senate to followthe Assembly’s lead in creating a modern regulatory structure that is up to thetask of protecting consumers and providing incentives for investment andinnovation in our 21st Century economy.”
NTU is a nonpartisan, nonprofitorganization working for lower taxes, smaller government, and economic freedomat all levels. More information on NTU’s telecommunications policy work isavailable at www.ntu.org.