Wireless Estimator reports ona bill that was going through the Congress yesterday (spoiler: Punchbowl news reported that this bill was pulled from the House floor). While the immediacy may be gone, I think it’s still helpful to know what is being discussed…

A bill working its way through Congress could be one of the most significant boosts the tower and telecom siting and contracting industry has seen in years — and it may be one step closer to becoming law by tonight.

H.R. 2289, the American Broadband Deployment Act, introduced by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), is a sweeping federal bill designed to streamline nationwide permitting for broadband and telecommunications infrastructure.
What began as a one-page proposal to exempt specified broadband projects from federal environmental and historic review requirements expanded dramatically through committee amendments into a roughly 100-page omnibus bill incorporating more than 20 separate permitting and preemption provisions affecting wireless siting, wireline broadband deployment, cable franchising, and federal review processes.
It would limit the ability of local governments to delay, restrict, or add costs to tower and network deployments — cutting through the kind of bureaucratic red tape that has slowed projects and drained contractor resources for years.

The bill has passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee and significantly restructures how local governments may regulate the placement, construction, and modification of communications facilities in public rights-of-way and on locally controlled property.

Industry support for the bill is broad and deep.

The industry is interested in bill; local governments are not as interested…

Not everyone is on board, however. A powerful coalition of local government organizations is fighting back hard. The National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, and the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors jointly oppose the bill, calling it an unprecedented and dangerous usurpation of local governments’ authority to manage public rights-of-way and land use.
The local organizations wrote that the bill “creates a framework that prioritizes communication companies’ shareholder value at the expense of the safety and financial interests of the communities and the taxpayers they serve.” Critics further argue that the bill would undermine public safety, force local taxpayers to subsidize private corporations, and disrupt the very broadband deployment progress it aims to accelerate.