Best City Bureaucrats

Office of Cable & Regulatory Affairs

We admire those who remain enthused about their work as it grows ever more thankless. The merry wonks at OCRA have, in the last year, negotiated a fractious franchise renewal with Austin CableVision; midwifed the city-wide broadband network project from a pie-eyed grandstand play to a fairly sensible franchise with CSW; dived headfirst into Doing Something about access television; and embarked on another, equally messy franchise renewal with Southwestern Bell. All this as the Feds, via the Telecommunications Act of 1996, dumped a load of new responsibilities on the localities, i.e., us. You'd have gone crazy; they appear unscathed.