Phone rates will rise, thanks to brute force and gutless lawmakers

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Let's be crystal clear about this. Do not let things get muddied up.

The state House is poised to raise your local telephone rates. The Senate will vote on the same bill soon.

However, your local member of the House or Senate has been advised in Tallahassee on what to tell YOU, the voter.

He or she is to say that the bill does not raise your phone rates. The members have been told to tell you that the final decision is up to the state Public Service Commission. I heard lawmakers get this cynical but frank advice with my own ears, in an open meeting.

So, I am here to tell you:

If your legislator votes for this bill and then tries to tell you that it was not a vote to raise your phone rates, it will not be true.

The bill raises rates. That is its very purpose.

The Legislature knows it.

You know it.

I know it.

The phone companies, they know it, too. That's why they wrote the bill in the first place, gave campaign money, hired lobbyists.

The bill will pass. Gov. Jeb Bush will sign it. Officially, the decision to raise rates will then go to the state Public Service Commission (which answers to the Legislature).

The commission will declare that the grounds exist for raising rates, as spelled out in the bill.

Your local rates will go up, to be phased in during the next two to four years. Call it up to $3.50 a month total for BellSouth and $4.50 to $5 a month for Verizon. Something like that. After that, they can keep increasing rates up to 20 percent a year.

Whether or not most legislators comprehend the complicated issues behind this bill, most of them do comprehend that their party leaders want them to vote for the phone companies.

They tell themselves, up in Tallahassee and away from the people, that they are showing "courage" and making the "tough call" by raising local phone rates. As for the citizens who complain, well, they just don't understand the issue.

Legislators even have prewritten form letters to explain to complaining citizens that they do not understand.

All in all, it has been a fairly discouraging exercise.

The language of the deal was delivered to the Legislature, as though from Moses coming down from Sinai, well into the 60 days of the Legislature's annual session.

The public did not have any input into writing the bill. Consumer groups did not have any input into writing the bill.

Johnnie Byrd, the speaker of the state House, says he is "family-friendly." But here Byrd is reaching directly into the pocket of every Florida household and taking money from it, by force, by the force of law, to give it to the phone companies.

Please notice that, at no time during my little Philippic against the Legislature, have I denied that Florida's telephone situation is outdated and out of whack.

Long-distance rates for in-state calls remain, bizarrely, far more expensive than interstate calls. There is no rational reason; it is a hangover from the old monopoly days in which long-distance helped subsidize local service.

There is some competition in local phone service, but most of that is for the most lucrative business customers. Meanwhile, the local phone company is still legally required to provide "universal" service for everybody else. The danger, in the long run, is that the local company is left holding the bag of least-profitable customers. They cannot survive that way.

My fundamental complaint all along has been about the Stone Age tactics of the telephone companies: applying brute force in the Legislature. They never offered any true, well-planned transition to a competitive local market. Their only answer was: Let us charge more money, and one day, gee, maybe more competition will come.

Each member of the House and Senate who voted for this bill was told, up in Tallahassee, that he or she would be able to tell you an untruth: that it was not a vote to raise phone rates. But it was, and when the next election comes, as it inevitably will, I hope that it sticks to them like gum to a shoe.

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