Opinion ID: 742595
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Timeliness of the Petitions

Text: 10 As for the matter of timeliness, BellSouth and SNET contend that their time to petition this court for review of the Commission's orders was tolled while the Commission considered their petitions for reconsideration. The Commission and intervenors assert that a petition for reconsideration that the Commission denies as repetitious does not toll the time to petition for judicial review. All parties agree that if the pendency of BellSouth's and SNET's petitions for reconsideration did toll the time to petition for review of the underlying orders, then their petitions for judicial review were timely filed. 11 The general rule is that a petition for reconsideration filed with the Commission will suspend the running of the period within which an appeal may be taken, and ... this period begins to run anew from the date on which final action is taken on the petition [325 U.S.App.D.C. 253] or motion, whether it be granted or denied. Los Angeles SMSA Ltd. Partnership v. FCC, 70 F.3d 1358, 1359 (D.C.Cir.1995). We see no reason to carve out an exception to this rule for cases in which the Commission dismisses a petition for reconsideration on the ground that it is repetitious. The Commission does not claim to have been plagued by even one repetitious petition for reconsideration filed solely for the purpose of tolling the time for filing a petition for judicial review; nor is it likely to be, for when time is short it is no harder to file a petition for judicial review than it is to file a petition for administrative reconsideration. Moreover, a petitioner seeking reconsideration by the agency may not always be able to anticipate whether its request will be dismissed as repetitious; we presume that a party files a petition for reconsideration rather than going directly to court only when it thinks the petition has a chance of succeeding. If we adopted the Commission's position, however, then many a party might be discouraged from seeking reconsideration before the agency lest it lose the opportunity thereafter to seek judicial review. For all of these reasons we reject the suggestion that we dismiss as untimely BellSouth's and SNET's petitions for judicial review.