As a state legislator, one of Rich Zipperer’s crowning achievements was an overhaul of regulations governing the state’s telecom industry. Before Zipperer’s 2011 bill, updating the rules was a perennial item on Republican wish lists, and AT&T Wisconsin lobbied hard for the changes. Cell phone companies, including Verizon and Sprint, were more skeptical of the changes since older providers, i.e. AT&T, stood to gain the most from them.
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| Rich Zipperer |
Consumer advocates — groups like the Citizens Utility Board — called the revisions “deregulation” and said they could lead to service blackouts in northern Wisconsin and rate exploitation.
Zipperer, who was named Gov. Scott Walker’s deputy chief of staff earlier this week (after the last guy took a job at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.), took up the torch in 2011, echoing AT&T’s arguments that removing controls on rates and requirements that it maintain old copper networks would free up the company to invest more heavily in broadband and other new technologies. The result, both said, would be jobs. About 50,000 new ones, in fact, claimed State. Sen. Zipperer (R-Pewaukee).
Well, the Politifact apparatus at the Journal Sentinel checked this out, and rated the 50,000 claim “barely true” in May 2011. For some reason*, it was further demoted to “mostly false” in July 2011, and an editor’s note was appended to the story. This isn’t surprising, after reading the piece, which concludes: “Even Zipperer and other backers admit they do not know how many jobs the new law will create, or how much money will actually be invested by telecom companies.”
Zipperer, a lawyer, will be working some with Walker’s legal team in his new position. Effects of the telecom overhaul are still being rolled out. The state Public Service Commission lost oversight of telecom rate increases, and as of April 2013, “incumbent” providers such as AT&T will no longer be required to maintain telephone service in rural areas where they’re the “provider of last resort.”
*NOTE: It’s important to know, as Daily Mil has learned, that Zipperer’s rating on the 50,000 claim changed when Politifact replaced its “Barely True” rating with “Mostly False” in 2011. The latter is more direct than the former, which relies on a hint of irony. And we can’t have irony when dealing with cold, hard facts. “Many readers said it put too much emphasis on ‘true’,” Politifact wrote when explaining its abandonment of the “Barely True” label.
