Last Friday, Broadcasting & Cable's veteran reporter and Washington Bureau Chief John Eggerton posted an article entitled "FCC Names First Enforcement Bureau Field Director". The article begins:

FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc announced Friday in an internal e-mail to staff that he plans to appoint the FCC's first ever Enforcement Bureau field director, Charles Cooper. Cooper comes from engineering consulting firm du Treil, Lundin & Rackley, where he was a partner and senior engineer.

Charles Cooper (2011)

Previously EB had announced that spectrum users with unresolved complaints "may contact the Field Director within 2 weeks after the period for the initial response". But only a few industry insiders were told who the acting field director was! (Actually it was also Mr. Cooper.) The policy also stated "Complainant may contact the relevant Regional Director within 1 week after the period for the initial response". For many years after EB was formed in the early 1980s from the former Field Operations Bureau, briefly renamed Compliance and Information Bureau, the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of field enforcement officials outside the Beltway were a closely held secret (even to non-EB FCC staffers) as all public contact was directed to the Call Center in Gettysburg. That changed a few years ago, but such contact information is really buried in the FCC's voluminous poorly organized web site. It certainly is not directly reachable from EB's home page.

Today, several days after the internal announcement and Mr. Eggerton's publication of the news and similar announcements in other publications, there is no word of this new appointment anywhere on the FCC or EB's website!

Headlines from EB homepage 11/17/15 10 AM

But does any of this surprise us when FCC never bothered to announce in 2013 that 2 senior official were getting the Presidential Rank Awards, a federal government-wide great honor for senior civil servants that had only been awarded 2 other times since 1978 to FCC staffers. So if the FCC has a million dollars to spend on consultants, perhaps they might also want to hire a consultant on how to motivate their staff more effectively by recognizing their accomplishments?

Here is a bio of Mr. Cooper dating to when he joined FCC a few years ago:

Prior to joining the FCC, Mr. Cooper has most recently been a Senior Engineer and Partner at the engineering consulting firm du Treil, Lundin & Rackley, where for twenty years he focused his engineering talents and expertise on communications issues and gained more than thirteen years of management experience. He is a Registered Professional Engineer, a former member of the Mississippi Air National Guard and Reservist, and a Cum Laude graduate of Mississippi State University. Mr. Cooper has performed and supervised many different types of communications projects including those in all of the broadcast services (AM/FM/TV/DTV). He also has experience inwireless, point-to-point microwave and land-mobile. He has served twice as president of the Association of Federal Communications Consulting Engineers.

Congratulations to Mr. Cooper on this appointment and our best wishes for success. Hopefully he can convince FCC leadership to give him the needed mix of personnel resources, overtime, travel funding, and equipment funding needed to do this key job. It would not hurt if key industry trade associations ask FCC leadership about the flow of resources to the remaining EB spectrum enforcement operation. Indeed, they might also want to talk to OMB and the congressional appropriation committees about the importance of adequate spectrum enforcement resources for their billions of dollars worth of Title III licenses.

Tags: enforcement, FCC personnel policy