Legislative Goals

Each year the SBE Board of Directors adopts legislative goals based on recommendations from its Government Relations Committee, General Counsel and interested members. The plan serves as a guideline for the Society on how it is to focus its resources in the areas of legislation and media regulation that affect our membership.

Legislative Goals for 2011

1. To protect the designation and capabilities of “broadcast engineers” from encroachment or abridgment by state and local governments. Resist state and local government restrictions of the term “broadcast engineer” and the practice of “broadcast engineers”. To also resist local and state infringement of broadcast engineers’ authority to perform the work necessary to operate and maintain federally licensed broadcast facilities.

2. To protect the integrity of broadcaster access to frequencies designated as broadcast auxiliary service (BAS) spectrum. The principal that the FCC’s role in spectrum allocations is to make technically sound judgments that maximize spectrum use while offering protection for incumbent radio services against harmful interference. The unfettered access to information provided by broadcasters that the public expects and to which the public is entitled necessitates protection of broadcast spectrum for the transmission of images, audio and data. The SBE opposes the reallocation of broadcast service and broadcast auxiliary service spectrum to, and encroachment by, incompatible licensed or unlicensed spectrum uses.

3. To promote the maintenance or increase of technical expertise within the FCC to ensure that decision making by the FCC is based on technical investigation, studies and evaluation rather than political expenditures. During times of extensive and creative new technology development, the FCC must have impartial and exceptionally trained engineering and RF experts on staff to ensure applicant claims are reasonable and substantiated based on sound technical principals and commonly accepted good practices of experimentation and engineering. As opposed to typical legal issues, the reliance simply upon the adversarial process while ignoring technical facts is an insufficient and inefficient method of determining in an unbiased way the veracity and accuracy of new technical concepts and complex physics.

4. To pursue such other matters that are brought to the attention of the Government Relations Committee by members, the board, or partners SBE is working with on its legislative agenda.

Suggestions or comments about SBE's legislative program and goals may be addressed to the SBE National Office.