WASHINGTON-Legislation guiding the transition to digital TV is creeping along as a Senate committee aims to address policy issues on the matter this week, while a House committee considers a bill that sets the hard date at Jan. 1, 2009.
The Senate Commerce Committee last week passed legislation earmarking $1 billion from digital TV auction revenues for public-safety interoperability and $250 million for implementing the enhanced 911 bill that passed last year. A draft bill released earlier this month set the date to free up 700 MHz spectrum at April 7, 2009, but did not include the specific earmarks.
Earmarking the auction revenues for specific projects, however, is likely to be resisted as the legislation moves forward. At the committee level, some Democrats who wanted to use the auction revenues for other purposes hotly contested the earmarks. Fiscal conservatives, on the other hand, wanted to use the money for deficit reduction. A $3 billion earmark to provide a subsidy for TV converter boxes was not challenged. But Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said he expected there would be challenges to the earmarks on the Senate floor.
An effort by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to move the DTV hard date to April 7, 2007, was defeated by a 5-17 vote. McCain offered legislation earlier this year setting the hard date at Jan. 1, 2009, but after Hurricane Katrina, he said he was going back to his original date of Jan. 1, 2007.
In urging defeat of the McCain amendment, Stevens said the Congressional Budget Office estimated the McCain amendment would not raise the $4.8 billion the Senate Commerce Committee had been directed to raise by the budget committee. McCain countered that he hoped “lives were more important than money.”
Congress is considering a hard date for the DTV transition as part of the 2006 budget reconciliation process.
The move to transition TV to digital technology-and free up spectrum at 700 MHz-has been under way since 1997, but often has stalled along the way. In 1997, Congress said that broadcasters in 10 years would have to return the extra 6 megahertz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band that was given to them to facilitate the DTV transition. But broadcasters could keep the spectrum if more than 15 percent of the homes in their viewing areas could not receive digital signals. Removing the caveat has become known as establishing a hard date and has been encouraged widely by the wireless industry, which wants access to some of the spectrum.
