State Bill Opposes Hike in Phone Access Fees

A key California legislator took aim Thursday at an attempt by Pacific Bell to add $232 million to local telephone bills by introducing legislation to prohibit the levying of so-called access charges against consumers until at least 1988.

Assemblywoman Gwen Moore (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee, introduced the prohibition as part of a legislative package of six bills and two resolutions that seeks, she told reporters, to spare consumers “telephone rate shock” as a result of the 13-month-old breakup of the Bell System.

As part of its bid to increase revenue by $1.36 billion next year, Pacific Bell warned the PUC that the access charges that it now levies against long-distance carriers are excessive and will lead them and their largest customers to build private networks to bypass the local network and avoid paying the fees.

The “bypass” issue has emerged as a major public-policy question since American Telephone & Telegraph Co. was forced to spin off its local phone companies in order to settle a federal antitrust lawsuit.

$800 Million Too Much

Access charges are a creation of regulators seeking a way to replace revenue lost to the former Bell local companies as a result of AT&T;’s divestiture. Within the tightly woven Bell System, subsidies from such profitable services as long distance and Yellow Pages advertising were used to keep basic telephone rates low enough to enable all who wanted telephone service to afford it.

San Francisco-based Pacific Bell maintains that long-distance carriers are paying more than $800 million too much in access charges, which they then pass on to their customers in the form of higher toll rates. The company proposes shift ing part of that burden--beginning with $232 million next year--to “end users” who, it maintains, pay less than their share of the costs of providing local service.

The state Public Utilities Commission is expected to rule on that issue this spring.

The Moore proposal would ban such a shift until Jan. 1, 1988, pending a study by the PUC of the effect of access charges already imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, charges she characterized to reporters as “repressive and unfair.”

No Position on Legislation

But a companion bill would eliminate any economic incentive for bypassing the regulated network by requiring “bypassers” to obtain prior PUC approval and pay a fee to the local telephone company equal to the revenue it would lose to the private network.

A spokesman for Pacific Bell said the company has yet to study the Moore legislation but would support any “practical and legal” means of eliminating the bypass issue. If that were done, Vice President Doug Cambern said, the company would not need to shift the $800-million access-charge burden.

“The escape route would be closed,” he said.

Another Moore bill would direct the PUC to analyze what classes of telephone customer benefit from improvements in the telecommunications networks that it regulates and apportion higher rates among them accordingly. Now, all customers share equally.

Such consumer groups as the San Francisco-based Toward Utility Rate Normalization maintain that customers wanting only “plain old telephone service” should not have to pay for highly sophisticated technology for moving data or video signals at high speeds.