WASHINGTON | Wed Dec 26, 2012 5:43pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Treasury on Wednesday announced the first of a series of measures that should push back the day when the government will exceed its legal borrowing authority as imposed by Congress by around two months.

Without any action, Treasury said the government is set to reach its $16.4 trillion debt ceiling on December 31.

The government is facing a crunch on the debt ceiling because the issue has become ensnarled in talks to avoid some $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts due to begin in early January. Failing to raise the debt ceiling could cause the government to default on its debt.

To cut government spending and delay bumping up against the debt ceiling, the Treasury will suspend issuance of state and local government series securities -- known as "slugs" -- beginning on December 28.

Investments in a government employee pension fund will also be suspended, along with some other measures, although Treasury did not give dates for when these other measures will begin.

"These extraordinary measures ... can create approximately $200 billion in headroom under the debt limit," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wrote in a letter to congressional leaders.

Normally, these measures would buy the Treasury about two months time before hitting the debt ceiling, Geithner said in the letter. But a series of planned tax hikes and spending cuts due to take effect in early January could give Treasury further time if they take effect as scheduled, he said.

"Treasury will provide more guidance regarding the expected duration of these measures when the policy outlook becomes clearer," he said.

The instruments known as slugs are special low-interest Treasury securities offered to state and local governments to temporarily invest proceeds from municipal bond sales. They have been suspended several times over the last 20 years to avoid hitting the debt ceiling.

Many analysts believe the measures available to the Treasury can stave that date off into late February.

The U.S. Congress typically authorizes government borrowing in a two-stage process, first drafting plans to spend more than it raises in tax revenues. Every few years, it raises a limit on government borrowing to accommodate annual deficits, a process that this year has become ensnared by the contentious budget talks in Washington.

(Reporting by Anna Yukhananov and Jason Lange; additional reporting by Pedro Da Costa; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar speaks before an experimental high flow release from the Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Arizona November 19, 2012.

WASHINGTON | Thu Dec 20, 2012 8:17am EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. federal government on Wednesday announced a plan to manage energy drilling on part of Alaska's North Slope, with the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve to be divided between areas available for oil and gas leases and those that are protected from development.

The announcement by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar followed the completion of an environmental impact study, which recommended development of areas that contain about 72 percent of the estimated "economically recoverable" oil in the reserve.

The move drew criticism from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who said the Obama administration had not gone far enough to open up oil and natural gas resources in the area.

Salazar said the plan as conceived would allow for the potential construction of pipelines carrying oil or gas from operations in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas through the NPR region, also known as the Western Arctic Reserve.

The "balanced approach" would help protect "significant caribou herds, migratory bird habitat and sensitive coastal resources that are critically important to the culture and subsistence lifestyle of Alaska Natives," Salazar said.

The administration has authorized 177 oil and gas leases in the reserve since May 2011, covering some 1.4 million acres. So far only exploratory drilling has occurred.

Under Wednesday's blueprint 11.8 million acres would be open for development, which are estimated to hold 549 million barrels of economically recoverable oil and 8.7 trillion cubic feet of economically recoverable natural gas.

Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, takes the view that the reserve's legal purpose is to provide petroleum to the United States to ensure the nation's energy security.

The administration's plan "locks up 83.5 percent of the likely natural gas in the reserve. That is totally unacceptable," she said.

The reserve is the largest single tract of public land in the country, roughly the size of Indiana, and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

Several environmentalists said they liked the plan, which protects the area around the North Slope's biggest lake.

"This is a nice holiday present for America's waterfowl hunters and bird watchers," said Adam Kolton, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation's national advocacy center, who praised the administration's "balanced approach."

But Brendan Cummings, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, decried the decision as "unfortunate".

"The Obama administration seems set on turning most of America's Arctic into a sacrifice zone for the benefit of oil companies," he said in an email.

(Additional reporting by Yereth Rosen; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

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NEW YORK | Wed Dec 19, 2012 9:12pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Public Library released designs on Wednesday for an overhaul of its flagship Beaux-Arts building in Manhattan that will open to the public spaces that only library staff have seen for the past few decades.

Under the plan, patrons will be able to borrow books from a new 100,000-square-foot lending library, creating what Mayor Michael Bloomberg said would be the largest combined research and circulating library in the world.

"With the Central Library Plan, we will open up more of our landmark building to the public, offering both circulating and research collections in one place, as well as the programs, classes, materials and services needed by our patrons," New York Public Library President Tony Marx said in a statement.

The building, with two stone lions famously guarding the entrance on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1911 and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965. It became a research-only library in 1981 when the lending library was rehoused in a relatively drab building across the street.

That building will be closed when the renovation project is completed in 2018.

Project architect Norman Foster, who has previously designed modern additions to other historic buildings such as the British Museum in London and the Reichstag in Berlin, said the flagship building's chandelier-bedecked Rose Main Reading Room would not be touched.

The library is making space for the lending library and increased research space by removing much of its stacks - seven stories of steel shelving containing millions of research volumes - at the rear of the building that are currently closed to the public.

Many scholars had previously criticized early plans to send most of the displaced volumes across the Hudson River to a storage building in New Jersey, saying the library's mission as a research center would be harmed if it were to take up to 24 hours for a requested book to arrive.

In response, the library said in September it had been given an $8 million donation allowing it to expand its underground storage space and keep onsite 3.3 million of the 4.5 million volumes currently stored there, with the remainder available nearly instantly in digital formats.

The library had earlier estimated the plan would cost $300 million but said on Wednesday the final budget would be higher, although it was not yet finalized. Bloomberg, who has endorsed the project, has said the city will contribute $150 million.

The library said the remainder of the funds will come from sales of buildings it owns nearby, and that consolidating several midtown libraries into one building will save about $15 million a year, which it will spend on librarians and books.

The plans still require approval from various city agencies, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission will have to give its approval for what the library calls "relatively minor" changes to the building's exterior before construction can begin next year.

(This story corrects reference in lead to who has access to areas being opened up)

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Lisa Shumaker)

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* Genachowski offers plan for modernizing USF

* Cable group says gives phone companies unfair advantage

* Proposal set for agency vote on Oct. 27 (Adds comments from industry and analyst)

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (Reuters) - The U.S. communications regulator unveiled on Thursday a proposal for achieving universal broadband coverage by the end of the decade.

Some 18 million Americans do not have access to broadband where they live and work despite some $4.5 billion in public money spent each year to subsidize telephone service for rural families.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed a strategy for revamping that government subsidy program to help deploy high-speed Internet service to millions of Americans living in rural and costly-to-serve areas.

"The costs of this broadband gap are measured in jobs not created, existing job openings not filled and our nation's competitiveness not advanced," Genachowski said in a speech on Thursday, acknowledging that the current program is broken.

The FCC earlier in the year proposed modernizing the $8 billion universal service fund -- paid for through fees added to consumers' telephone bills -- to spur infrastructure investment while removing inefficiencies in the program.

Genachowski's proposal would gradually move the largest program within the universal service fund, the program that subsidizes telephone service, to directly support fixed and mobile broadband.

His plan would also phase out funding for duplicating services offered by several phone companies serving the same area.

Broadband buildout to unserved areas could begin in early 2012 under the plan, bringing high-speed Internet to hundreds of thousands of homes in the near-term.

"It will help cut the number of Americans bypassed by broadband by up to one half over the following five years, and it will put us on the path to universal broadband by the end of the decade," Genachowski added.

The comprehensive set of reforms will be circulated to the other commissioners on Thursday, and are set for a vote at the FCC's Oct. 27 meeting.

CABLE INDUSTRY NOT HAPPY

Genachowski outlined a new competitive bidding process for securing funds from the program, but the American Cable Association said it bent heavily to incumbent phone companies.

The proposal would quickly move to this bidding process in some areas, but others would not shift until later years.

ACA said this would give incumbent phone carriers first dibs at monies from the fund while other broadband providers, like cable, wait years for the option to competitively bid to receive support in those areas.

"The chairman's plan locks in a sole-source contract worth billions of dollars for over ten years to a handful of incumbent large telecom companies," ACA Chief Executive Matthew Polka said in a statement.

ACA represents independent companies providing broadband service to 7.6 million subscribers.

But Genachowski argued in his speech that "a flash-cut to competitive bidding in some parts of the decades-old program risks consumer disruption, build-out delays, and other unintended consequences."

In order to push reform through, certain policy and political trade-offs must be made, and that may limit cable companies' prospects for receiving federal broadband support, said Medley Global Advisors analyst Jeffrey Silva.

"The political sensitivities almost demand that in order to get any sort of consensus that's politically viable, you have to get buy-in by rural telephone companies," Silva said.

"That may be the best this chairman or any chairman is going to be able to do because it's not just about policy, it's about politics," he added. (Reporting by Jasmin Melvin, editing by Bernard Orr)

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