Coordinator of the Librarians’ Index to the Internet.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for January 2002
Despite the filtering requirements added by the Children’s Internet Protection Act, librarians who have previously filed for the e-rate should continue to do so (unless they’re completely burned out on the bureaucratic burdens of the application process). As the FCC has been interpreting CIPA and the e-rate, even if you choose not to filter you can still get discounts on your data lines and your internal connections. And you should continue to file for discounts on your Internet connections—you can always refuse the money if CIPA is upheld in court. Bob Bocher’s E-Rate FAQ is the best resource on the topic (and my own PLA TechNote on filtering is a nice companion).
Alyce J. Bowers, director of Atlantic County (N.J.) Public Library, offered this important advice: “File separate applications for separate services. Do not combine your Internet with your telecommunications or POTS [Plain Old Telephone Service], but do three or more separate applications.” If something goes wrong, you only lose funding for that application, not all your services. Her library has received $178,000 this year—a nice pile of dinero.
Believe it or not, my best experience with the Universal Service Administrative Company’s Schools and Libraries Division (which administers the e-rate program) was with an auditor (who shall remain nameless) who gently prodded me to go back and find phone bills that would ensure our application matched what we were claiming as our average telco expenses. You know who you are, you nice person!
Others have commented on the help desk. John Richmond of Alpha Park Public Library District in Bartonville, Illinois, told me, “Despite the bureaucracy of it all, the real, live people I’ve spoken with at the help desk have been patient and kind.”
The application process is painful. Mary Satterwhite of Temple Terrace (Fla.) Public Library comments, “There ought to be a way that once you have certified that you are a public library or school that you do not have to reprove that every year.” But the requalification process is not nearly as tough as finding out that you aren’t getting all or most of what you requested.
The fact that it’s referred to as an appeal process—and not a correction process—is itself telling. The perfect analogy came from Patrice Hollman of Albany (N.Y.) Public Library, whose library is snarled in an appeals process over tens of thousands of dollars, due to a form that printed out with blackened dots in the wrong area. She called the SLD’s approach to errors “akin to Jane Doe filling out her tax return and forgetting to sign the form. The IRS then sends a Dear Jane letter saying that Jane can’t have her tax refund because of her mistake.”
It’s not only that forms get rejected or libraries get dragged into endless appeals; it’s that the drawn-out process, with its protracted silences and Johnny-come-lately rejection letters, seems like a cat toying with a half-dead mouse.
It took six months for the e-rate folks to explain to Linda V. Ballard, director of the University City (Mo.) Public Library, why they rejected her application. “On the line asking about [our technology plan], I neglected to write the word ‘none,’ so the entire form was thrown out and I had to resubmit it with the word ‘none’ on this line—which delayed our discounts until three-fourths of the year through that cycle.”
Miriam Meier of the Southern Adirondack Library System in Saratoga Springs, New York, reported a similar tale. “Each time we called we were told that everything on our application ‘looks fine,’ yet in a letter dated July 26, 2001, (received August 1) our application was denied” because SALS had used a slightly outdated Form 471. That’s $100,000 that they are qualified to receive but won’t get if they don’t win the appeal.
Who benefits from e-rate being so convoluted (aside from the obvious answer: the folks who don’t want to increase funding for schools and libraries)? Susan Hagloch, director of Tuscarawas County (Ohio) Public Library, spent countless hours applying for e-rate, only to have her application ultimately rejected. For the following year, she decided to outsource her e-rate paperwork to a company that promised to do it all for a set percentage of any e-rate monies actually received. Yet she still found herself investing hours on “many, many phone calls, e-mails, and thick copies of all our bills.” She paid the company 10% of the estimated e-rate refund, as reported on the SLD site; but in the end, she received a third of what was projected. “We had paid the paperwork people $1,561, leaving us with a net profit of $871.72, less the cost of my time and that of my clerk-treasurer.”
Bette Ammon, director of the Missoula (Mont.) Public Library, shared her trip through e-rate hell with me. “In year two the e-rate folks informed me that Missoula County Communications wasn’t recognized as a bona-fide telco provider and I couldn’t receive a discount on their services. In fact they wanted me to refund most of what we had received the previous year.” The appeals process has dragged on, Bleak House style, and Ammon has chosen not to file this year, due to the snafus and, as she puts it, “the CIPA stuff.”
“The CIPA stuff” is indeed a consideration. Yes, you should file, in case the act is overturned in court. But if CIPA is upheld, do you need money so badly that you would filter every computer in your library—for adults as well as children, staff as well as the public?