Hill Poised To Take Spectrum Auction Action

Congress could adopt legislation this week that would pave the way for the FCC to conduct incentive auctions of TV spectrum and share the proceeds of those auctions with broadcasters that voluntarily give up their spectrum.

The House is expected to vote tomorrow or Wednesday on a major GOP jobs package called “The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2011,” to which the spectrum auction proposal adopted early this month by the House Communications Subcommittee has been attached.

The House spectrum measure, authored by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.), has the blessing of the NAB because it contains protections for stations that chose not to relinquish their spectrum.

Once the House acts, the package is expected to move on to the Senate and win final approval by Friday or over the weekend.

But there is still a possibility that the spectrum provisions could be dropped from the jobs package if Republicans and Democrats are unable to settle their differences over several critical issues, some of which are incidental to the auction authority.

Chief among them is a provisions dealing with the allocation of the so-called D-block spectrum to establish a national broadband public safety network. House Democrats are objecting primarily to provisions dealing with the governance and funding of the public safety network.

And the Democrats are also unhappy with a controversial provision that would prohibit the FCC from applying its net neutrality rules to any new spectrum holder.

House Republicans and Senate Democrats are also trying to reconcile key elements of the spectrum provisions.

Republican are insisting on language that would prohibit allocating spectrum from incentive auctions for unlicensed use and prevent the FCC from restricting who can buy the spectrum broadcasters give up.

There is also squabbling over the compensation of broadcasters that would have to change channels in the “repacking” of the TV band. House Democrats say that the $3 billion relocation fund favored by the Republicans is too much and that the fund should be $1 billion as recommended by the Congressional Budget Office.

But it’s D-block and net neutrality that are seen now as the real sticking points.

“In the negotiation process, those are going to be harder to deal with and more important to get resolved than the broadcaster issues,” says a broadcast industry source close to the negotiations.

“It is all up in the air; there are so many moving parts,” he says. “If they can’t come to an agreement, they may say, ‘let’s deal with it next year.’ “