More Questions Than Answers in Telecom Visit : Technology: D.C. group, local leaders discuss access to information highway.

Dogging all the hype and cliches about the hoped-for information highway is a single troubling question: If we build a cutting-edge, two-way communications system, will anyone but the affluent and technologically savvy use it?

Several Washington bureaucrats paid a visit to Los Angeles on Wednesday to hear the California perspective on the future of telecommunications, a pet project of Vice President Al Gore. They met with more questions than answers in generally amicable but occasionally heated exchanges with dozens of academicians, politicians, clinic directors, community activists, homeless advocates and telephone companies.

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Opening a daylong session at the California Museum of Science and Industry, Larry Irving, an assistant secretary of commerce, said the government’s role is to ensure that “we don’t leave some citizens behind in information poverty.” But he added, “How can we do that when 1 in 14 people in South-Central Los Angeles don’t have a phone?”

Likewise, Latino activists pressed hard the argument that a technologic age means little to immigrants who do not have access to a phone, cannot communicate with English-speaking operators or do not even grasp that 911 is the number to call in medical emergencies.

The hearing, postponed by last month’s earthquake, is the second in a series of meetings that Irving and others will hold around the country to size up what people need and want in the way of information services.

Among the suggestions they heard for achieving universal access to information:

* Assemblywoman Gwen Moore (D-Los Angeles) called for no less than providing a computer in every home, a la France’s ubiquitous Minitel system, which has encouraged even 10-year-olds to devise new computer uses.

* Pacific Bell proposed a two-tier rate structure that would let customers pay one low monthly rate for such basic existing services as a dial tone and 911, or a higher rate that would also cover access to databases and the Internet.

* Bong Hwan Kim, executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center, said community-based organizations, if wired for the new generation of interactive services, could be a new “infrastructure for empowerment” for immigrants and young people. Building telecommunications capabilities into affordable housing projects, he said, could help ensure that disadvantaged Californians are on an equal information footing.

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Audrie Krause, executive director of Toward Utility Rate Normalization, a San Francisco consumer watchdog, said ratepayers should not be required to pay for immense investments in equipment that they might have little interest in using.

“One of the major challenges for regulators,” she said, “is to resist pressure from (local phone companies) to make ratepayers involuntary investors in an advanced telecommunications infrastructure.”

Joining Irving, who ran the session, were David J. Barram, a former Apple Computer executive who is now a deputy secretary of commerce, and Federal Communications Commissioner Andrew C. Barrett.