Looking Forward to Fall

Fall is for so many reasons my favorite season. Brilliant foliage, cooler weather, apple picking, and college football, among other delights, make it special. This also is the season when the NASBP community, through the East, West, and Midyear Meetings, comes back together in-person to celebrate industry efforts and achievements and to prepare for and to adapt to what lies ahead. Fall is said to be a season of mindfulness, as it presents opportunities to reflect, to plan, and to seek balance, and, indeed, in the NASBP calendar, fall is a time for taking stock of where we are as an association and a surety community before we transition to the next calendar year.

A notable association accomplishment will be profiled at the fall NASBP meetings, both East & West meetings, which include panel sessions on how the surety industry coalesced around and advocated for surety bonds as alternative forms of security to letters of credit under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Administered by the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications & Information Administration, the BEAD Program provides billions of dollars in federal broadband funding to states seeking to enhance their broadband infrastructure in rural and underserved areas. Without a concerted and sustained advocacy effort, surety bonds, in the form of performance bonds, would not be part of the security equation for BEAD projects; now, the surety industry has a new, national market!

Instrumental to the advocacy effort was NASBP’s Director of Government Relations, Larry LeClair, who will moderate the panel discussions. Joining Larry are Robert Duke of Markel Surety, Steve Rae of Liberty Mutual Surety, and Quinn Jordan of the Mississippi Broadband Association. Larry and I had the privilege of working with Rob, Steve, and other surety professionals in a joint NASBP-SFAA working group to define and craft performance bond forms and related materials tailored to the needs of the BEAD Program for the guidance and benefit of state broadband offices and internet service providers. Although NASBP has long advocated (through setting meetings and issuing comment letters) for all federal agencies administering grant and loans for broadband infrastructure to consider use of performance bonds as acceptable forms of security, once NTIA issued notice that, in their BEAD Program, performance bonds would be acceptable in lieu of letters of credit, NASBP and SFAA needed to act quickly to develop usable bond forms, contract language, and guidance to ensure viable conditions for BEAD performance bonds. The development process involved expedient outreach to all principal stakeholders, including NTIA officials, state broadband officials, internet service providers, and other actors in the broadband space. The result was the publication of the BEAD Bond kit, accessed here, a remarkable achievement. This success also buoys our efforts to convince other federal agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission, to follow NTIA’s lead.

Other sessions at the East and West meetings will focus on an NASBP initiative underway to present college-level business students with information on surety career paths; the bond producer’s role in the surety claims process; and whether surety agencies are utilizing artificial intelligence to drive agency value and efficiency.

I truly hope that you will register, if you haven’t already done so, for one of the fall meetings. Please come and take stock of what your association is doing to advance your professional and business interests and enjoy all the opportunities to learn and to meet and to network with your peers. It promises to be a special time with you there!