Best Best's Lederer Criticizes Description of GOP Permitting Bill as 'Partnership' With Localities
Best Best localities lawyer Gerry Lederer pushed back Wednesday night against comments from Wireless Infrastructure Association CEO Patrick Halley that the American Broadband Deployment Act (HR-2289) represents a “partnership between industry and local government” aimed at easing connectivity permitting processes (see 2601090064). The House Commerce Committee in December advanced HR-2289, which combined language from 22 GOP-led connectivity permitting bills, by a closer-than-expected 26-24 party-line vote (see 2512030031). It would, in part, set a 150-day shot clock for states and localities to approve new deployments and a 90-day window for modifications to existing infrastructure.
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“No one in local government feels that” HR-2289 is a partnership between them and the communications industry, Lederer emailed us. It’s a “usurpation of local government property and police powers. It’s about a whole lot more than just shot clocks.” He said HR-2289 is “more offensive” than a similar version of the package during the last Congress, which was advanced by House Commerce but never reached the floor amid Democratic resistance (see 2305230067).
A summary that Lederer sent of “major differences” in HR-2289 from its earlier iteration said it now “surrenders … local government police power and property rights … in favor of the industry without any industry obligations to serve or share savings.”
HR-2289 would “create an FCC alternative to review local permitting decisions, undoing the 1996 Telecom Act’s preference for courts,” the summary said. The “FCC is given 120 days to make a decision,” effectively transforming the agency “into a national right-of-way and land use oversight authority over communications facilities, and one, unlike the courts, that has no right-of-way or land use expertise and is heavily biased in industry’s favor.”
HR-2289’s previous iteration, which the summary nicknamed the “Preemption & Takings Act,” was already an “unprecedented and dangerous usurpation of local governments’ authority to manage public rights-of-way and land use; it strips local governments of property rights and compensation in favor of cable, wireless and telecommunications providers.”