RALEIGH—A bill that has passed the state House would turn what was intended to be a temporary state authority into a permanent bureaucracy, with expanded responsibilities.
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Joe Tolson, D-Edgecombe, preserves the Rural Internet Access Authority, created in 2000 through a bill that was sponsored by Sen. Eric Reeves, D-Wake. The law that established the RIAA required the authority to be dissolved Dec. 31, 2003.
“What we don’t want is to create a whole new bureaucracy that lasts forever,” Reeves told The News & Observer of Raleigh in June 2000.
Tolson’s bill would create the E-NC Authority, which continues the work of the Rural Internet Access Authority. The nonprofit was established to “manage, oversee, and monitor efforts to provide rural counties with high-speed broadband Internet access.” Among its goals:
• Local dial-up Internet access from every telephone exchange within one year;
• Affordable high-speed Internet access available to every North Carolina citizen within three years;
• Significant increases in ownership of computers, web devices, and Internet subscriptions promoted throughout the state.
The legislation also expands the authority’s oversight for broadband Internet access to include “distressed urban areas.”
Sen. Virginia Foxx, a Banner Elk Republican who serves on the Information Technology Committee, said the RIAA has only “some loose ends” to tie up to complete its original mission. She’s willing to let the authority finish its work, but said continuing it as a new state agency is a bad idea.
“What they’re creating is a bureaucracy that doesn’t need to be created,” she said.
Those “loose ends” are to provide for the continuation of the RIAA website and to complete work financed by about $13 million in authority grants, said Dwight Allen, executive director of the North Carolina Telephone Cooperative Coalition, which opposes the bill.
“We’ve asked [RIAA] if there’s something else they want to do,” he said. “We haven’t heard.”
But Jane Smith Patterson, executive director of the RIAA, said the authority has yet to complete all of its goals. She said that at the end of last year, only 49 percent of potential rural customers in the state had the opportunity to get affordable broadband service. She said the state underestimated the amount of time required to accomplish all it was called upon to do.
“I think what happens is when you get into this,” she said, “it’s a huge state and there’s still a lot to be done.”
Supporters of the bill believe the authority should be maintained to oversee any future private or federal grants it might receive, then distribute. The authority, which started with $30 million in funding from the nonprofit MCNC, is expected to have about $700,000 at the end of the year. Patterson said she expected E-NC wouldn’t need any state money for at least three years. Allen said if E-NC continued to get grants it would self-perpetuate.
“Our point,” he said, “is that [expanding broadband] is something we think is going to be done by the private sector.”