The Minn. PUC isn’t planning to vote on endorsement of Qwest’s Se...

The Minn. PUC isn’t planning to vote on endorsement of Qwest’s Sec. 271 interLATA long distance application until it knows whether the company will challenge the agency’s Feb. 28 order setting the penalties for Qwest’s secret interconnection deals with selected competitors. Comrs. Phyllis Reha and Gregory Scott said Qwest long distance entry wouldn’t be in the public interest until the carrier owned up to its anticompetitive behavior and accepted its punishment. The PUC last week concluded 2 days of hearings on the Qwest 271 application during which the company picked up unexpected support from the Minn. Dept. of Commerce, the agency that filed the initial secret-deal complaint. Qwest has until March 20 to seek reconsideration of the PUC’s order that it either pay a $26 million fine or refund to CLECs 10% of the last 2 years’ wholesale service billings and give a 10% wholesale service discount for the next 2 years. If Qwest sought a rehearing, the PUC 271 vote probably would be delayed until the reconsideration plea was decided. That’s if Qwest doesn’t file at the FCC before the PUC makes its decision, in which case the PUC would have to decide within 20 days. In last week’s hearings, the Minn. Commerce Dept. told the PUC it couldn’t fight the “mist of inevitability blowing from the FCC” on long distance approvals. The agency’s deputy administrator, Edward Garvey, urged the PUC to support the Qwest petition but also open a separate proceeding to address any local market problems that still faced the state’s CLECs. He acknowledged his support represented a complete reversal of direction for the agency but said the previous Commerce administration under former Gov. Jesse Ventura (I) had called things as it saw them, but that now it was his job to “call it like I see it.”