House Ways and Means Committee talked about:

HF1704 (Anderson, P.H.) Department of Agriculture, the Board of Animal Health, the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute, and the Office of Broadband Development budget established; policy and technical changes made to agricultural and broadband provisions; rulemaking authorized; reports required; and money appropriated.

Bill was held over.

It is a broad bill so I’m only focusing on broadband. Also, it sounds like policymakers didn’t have all of the documents, so conversations were a little stilted. It seems like a big issue here is that there isn’t bipartisan support and now that the House is spilt, they need to work on bipartisan support.

Questions on broadband:

Q: I notice that in this funding bill there are funds to DEED but there are provisions on training requirements for broadband installers that might be better suited to Labor. This is something that passed in committee when Republicans had majority but there was concern. It rolls back regulation that passed last year. It’s frustrating to see here. It would cause me to vote against. Why was this included here instead of Workforce Labor and Development?
That bill has been through many stops and for some reason we are given purview to fund OBD so we added the provision in the bill.

Q: Can we ask the fiscal staff?
Broadband account has been in Ag for the past few years.
I thought that was undecided for this year.
It seems like it is.

Q: OK – so the funding is here. But why are the labor requirements here and not in Labor? I have concerns about safety.

Q: Are there provisions in this bill that have passed with bipartisan support?
No

Q: Are there provisions that weren’t heard in committee in the bill?
They were heard in committees, or in markup, and one I didn’t clarification for.
It seems as if there were several provisions that weren’t heard in committee and we don’t have more info in front of us.

Q: I’m concerned about safety of workers – that’s a nonstarter for me. Maybe we can separate that bill.
That bill has been through many stops, people are working on it.

Q: Broadband is important, and this is one bill we can get done now and broadband construction can begin. A lot of what was said about safety was not true. We need to reduce the broadband training barrier to take advantage of federal funding. Decisions made last year were hyper-partisan.