Martin grilled over Hatfield dismissal

REP. MIKE DOYLE (D-PA.), vice chairman of the House telecom subcommittee, accused Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin of misleading Congress on abruptly terminating a contract for a new enhanced 911 study days after agency staff learned of key findings flagging serious problems with locating emergency wireless callers inside buildings and in rural areas.
Martin’s decision last year to cut short the E911 contract of Dale Hatfield, a highly regarded former telecom policy-maker, is not contested. The reason for Hatfield’s dismissal, the factual circumstances surrounding the decision and the chronology of events are disputed and thus remain murky. Doyle grilled Martin on the matter at last Wednesday’s subcommittee hearing.
“When Chairman Martin said that Mr. Hatfield ‘never presented any of
the initial findings to us’ he was at best mistaken, and at worst willfully misrepresenting the truth. Mr. Hatfield presented his tentative findings to FCC staff on May 10, 2006,” said Doyle in a press release following the hearing.
Hatfield authored a major report in 2002 for the FCC on challenges facing wireless E911. Hatfield-chair of the advisory committee on the Bush spectrum initiative and a consultant who teaches at the University of Colorado-was asked by former FCC chairman Michael Powell in 2004 to conduct a follow-up examination of the state of E911 in the wireless and voice-over-Internet-protocol sectors, Martin told lawmakers last week. Martin was an FCC commissioner then. He became chairman in March 2005. Doyle said the FCC renewed Hatfield’s contract for a follow-up report in the fall of 2005.
While E911 funding and deployment continue to be major obstacles to this day, Hatfield identified to FCC staff last year some additional troubling issues. Locating wireless 911 callers-particularly those with GPS-location enabled handsets-is apt to become a serious problem with the trend toward increased indoor cellular calling, Hatfield told FCC staff. Estimates of indoor cellphone calls range from 30 percent to 60 percent of calls made. Hatfield also told FCC officials wireless E911 was particularly problematic in rural areas and that federal regulators should do more to standardize measurement of location accuracy.
Shortly after presenting FCC staff with his tentative findings, Martin dumped Hatfield without telling him why.
“It seems odd to me that the chairman’s office killed the report right after that-and that the chairman now claims he never knew what Mr. Hatfield had found,” Doyle said. “I found chairman Martin’s testimony this morning unconvincing and disturbing, and I will be very interested in his response to my inquiry.”
In a letter to Martin last week, Doyle directed the FCC chief to provide a full accounting in writing by March 20.
Doyle asked Martin to explain why Hatfield’s second report was nixed; to provide a copy of contractual materials, e-mail memoranda, letters and call logs related to the second report Hatfield was to write; to supply a list of Hatfield’s tentative findings presented to agency staff; and to give a detailed timeline of events in connection with the would-be second E911 report and its early termination.
Martin told lawmakers Hatfield had been on contract with the FCC since 2000, having paid him more than $10,000 in 2004 and then contracted for an additional $10,000 for the updated E911 report. Hatfield ended up receiving $9,500 for his work on the latter.
“He never presented any of the initial findings to us and indeed when I found out about the contract, which I was unaware of until the spring of 2006, we actually asked him that he provide us with a summary of his findings and where he was going on this report, which he declined. As a result of his declining to provide any of the information of what he was doing, I didn’t think it was important to renew the contract and continue to pay any more for that month,” Martin told the House telecom subcommittee.
The FCC stands by Martin’s congressional testimony.
“The chairman’s office was not aware that Mr. Hatfield may have briefed bureau staff on elements of his report,” said Tamara Lipper, an FCC spokeswoman.
The FCC maintains Martin also was unaware Hatfield’s contract was renewed in the fall of the year he became FCC chairman.
Hatfield told RCR Wireless News he indeed briefed FCC staff on tentative conclusions based on interviews with major E911 stakeholders and was not yet in stage of writing the actual report.
“I remain concerned about the issues raised in the tentative findings,” Hatfield said.
Before last Wednesday’s FCC oversight hearing in the House, Lipper was quoted as saying the FCC terminated Hatfield’s contract for the follow-up E911 study to save taxpayers money. During his testimony, Martin, while speaking highly of Hatfield, appeared to inject into the controversy the issue of objectivity.
“I did not think it was necessary to pay an outside contractor who, by the way, is also a contractor to many of the entities that lobby us, to continue to provide technical support when I think we have the technical expertise to be addressing these very issues,” said Martin. However, it is unclear what precisely the FCC is doing to address the wireless location problems raised by Hatfield.
“What we really need is six inches [wireless location accuracy],” said Patrick Halley, government affairs director for the National Emergency Number Association. “I hope it’s a priority [at the FCC],” he added.
Doyle agreed. “The real issue here, however, is whether the FCC has been working to identify and fix the problems in our nation’s E911 system,” he said.