Chattanooga Mayor Urges Cities' Support for Municipal Broadband Law Pre-emption at FCC
Municipalities should encourage the FCC to act on the petitions from the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina, seeking FCC pre-emption of state municipal broadband laws, said Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke at a Next Century Cities launch event Monday. NCC is a pro-municipal broadband coalition of 32 cities that includes Chattanooga and Wilson. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in a webcast speech that he welcomes municipal broadband and public-private partnerships to increase broadband deployments, and he believes broadband is now “essential infrastructure.”
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Berke encouraged municipalities to voice public support for the Chattanooga and Wilson petitions, including by filing comments in the FCC’s twin dockets for the petitions and by submitting opinion pieces to news organizations. Chattanooga’s EPB is seeking pre-emption of Tennessee’s restriction on municipal broadband deployments so it can extend its fiber network into neighboring Bradley County and other interested communities beyond EPB’s current utility footprint. “There’s no reason why, if they want our municipal broadband, why it shouldn’t be able to expand out there,” Berke said. “This is a really critical issue about what the future of expansion for broadband in our country looks like.” Berke made similar comments in a joint column in The Hill with Joey Durel, city-parish president of Lafayette, Louisiana (http://bit.ly/1onre39).
Durel said during the NCC event that he also believes state governments “put a lot of impediments in the way of cities” seeking to deploy municipal broadband. Lafayette’s deployment of its Lafayette Utilities System (LUS) Fiber network spawned some of the earlier court battles over municipal broadband, but Durel said, “I like the battle.” The controversy that projects like LUS Fiber cause is a “necessary evil” that helps to generate interest in the projects, he said.
Municipal broadband “is not a partisan issue to those of us in this room, and it shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” but it has become one at the federal level, said Durel, a Republican. He said he hoped the nonpartisan NCC would help “elevate the discussion in Washington.” Berke, a Democrat, said he was concerned that partisanship could increase: “While we’d all love to say that this is nonpartisan and that what we do at a local level is nonpartisan, the more that cities link up and the more that this expands, the greater the danger that it becomes partisan.”
Dana Kirkham, mayor of Ammon, Idaho, said she's pushing the state’s legislature to clarify what she called “vaguely defined” laws for municipal broadband and define fiber as a utility. “We’re hoping that they’ll catch up with what’s already happening,” she said.