Streetlight gifts to mobile carriers spread to other states

15 April 2018 by Steve Blum
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California is not the only state where lobbyists for mobile carriers and other big, incumbent cable and telephone companies are giving stacks of cash offering somber advice to state legislators and getting huge gifts of public property in return. According to a couple of articles by Timothy Clark in Route Fifty, several other states are preempting local ownership of vertical infrastructure and municipal control of public right of ways.

In some states, the giveaway is even more generous than the California’s gift to telecoms lobbyists last year, senate bill 649. It was vetoed by governor Jerry Brown, who eased the pain by reinforcing AT&T’s and Frontier Communications monopoly in rural California with $300 million and, effectively, an end to similar subsidies for independent broadband projects. SB 649 would have set a blanket $250 a year lease rate for wireless broadband providers to attach cell sites and other equipment to city owned street lights. Depending on how you figure it, that’s something like one-fourth to one-half of the market rate.

In Texas, lawmakers went one better and sliced off a zero, setting the maximum municipal pole lease rate at $20 a year. The City of McAllen, Texas sued, claiming that the preemption violated the Texas constitution. McAllen is no stranger to fighting for municipal broadband rights, by the way. It drafted a “minority report” protest to the Federal Communications Commission over the way that industry lobbyists hijacked the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, and convinced San Jose and New York City to sign on.

According to Clark’s story

“In our legal analysis,” [McAllen city attorney Kevin Pagan] said, “the law forces us to give gifts to private parties. It is forcing us to give access to our rights-of-way at far less than market value. What about other companies using the rights of way? They are paying higher rates, and why wouldn’t they say, ‘What about us?’”

The wireless telecom companies, he continued, “want access to the rights of way like public utilities, but they don’t want to be regulated like a public utility.” Pagan noted while the companies promote small-cell as cutting-edge wireless technology, the cells rely on a vast fiber cable network that comprises 90 percent of the system, largely strung on poles in the rights of way.

Georgia lawmakers also passed similar legislation, and a preemption bill is making its way through the Nebraska legislature.