U.S. NEEDS TO REFORM RIGHT-OF-WAY POLICIES, OFFICIALS SAY
Increased deployment of fiber lines for broadband and other uses has expedited need for rights-of way (ROW) fee reforms, govt. appraisers and telecom industry officials said Tues. at forum sponsored by Appraisal Institute. Federal govt. has been reassessing its ROW fee schedule since 1995 review by Interior Office of U.S. Inspector Gen. and 1996 General Accounting Office (GAO) audit. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS), which authorize ROW grants, adopted current rental schedule for linear ROW uses on National Forest System and public lands in 1986, and fiber lines aren’t part of that schedule.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
“The GAO and IG reports reminded us that we needed to revise our schedule by law and for good practices,” said Dan Nowell, senior appraiser for USFS. Rental schedule provides for review after certain land and valuation indexes are exceeded, which occurred in 1996. Current reassessment was initiated after 1995 review and 1996 audit revealed that USFS and BLM hadn’t collected almost $50 million rent due to inefficiencies of fee schedule. “The increase in fiber optic lines coincided with these reports,” Nowell said. Fact that there’s no place for fiber lines under current fee schedule, Nowell said, “is obviously an issue we need to address.”
Without significant changes to ROW policy, telecom businesses are looking at possibly billions of dollars in future expenses from new fees, said Eric Myers, exec. dir. of Telecom Right-of-Way Coalition (TelROW). Telecom industry tends to stretch communication lines across nation, Myers said, and “as these lines move through Midwestern states to access California and other border states, infrastructure providers are concerned about substantial right-of-way fee increases.” There is ambiguity in appraising public lands for telecom businesses, Myers said, and such ambiguity can “undermine the credibility of the process and jeopardize the build-out of new infrastructure.” “Predictable, legitimate and practical fee schedules are the goal here,” he said: “This goal of efficiency should not lead to an adversarial process.”
Myers and other industry officials questioned inclusion of changing technologies and changing land uses in new fee schedules. “We need to treat land use differently if the technology used on that land has changed,” Myers said. Verizon official David Mielke said rural ROW corridor fee should reflect fair market value of land as well as use of land. Robert Cunningham, asst. dir. of lands for USFS, said new fee schedule should consider technology used on site- specific basis.