The Institue for Local Self Reliance...

Community broadband advocates have scored a major victory in Minnesota as state lawmakers there have repealed the state’s preemption laws that prevented cities and towns in the Land of 10,000 Lakes from providing municipal broadband services.

The new legislation, signed into law yesterday by Gov. Tim Walz, took aim at two statutes that sought to protect large monopoly telecommunications providers from competition.

New Law Unwinds Antiquated Statutes

One antiquated law that had been on the books for over a century (Minn. Stat. Ann. § 237.19) allowed municipalities in Minnesota to buy or construct “telephone exchanges” only if they secured a supermajority vote in a local referendum election. Though intended to regulate telephone service, the way the law had been interpreted after the invention of the Internet was to lump broadband in with telephone service thereby imposing that super-majority threshold to the building of broadband networks.

Another law (Minn. Stat. Ann. § 429.021(19)) gave municipalities the express authority to “improve, construct, extend, and maintain facilities for Internet access” but only if a private provider was not offering service in that municipality.

But this week, with a single omnibus bill (SF 4097), those old preemption laws were repealed by state legislators and signed into law by the Gov. Walz yesterday, officially paving the way for any municipality in the state to have the option of building networks to offer municipal broadband service or partner for the same.