Local governments from around the U.S. asked the federal appeals court in San Francisco to speed up consideration of their challenge to the Federal Communications Commission preemption of local ownership and control of the public right of way and assets located in it, such as street light poles and traffic signals.
In a motion filed last month, they told judges that on the one hand, disputes are piling up, and on the other, the FCC is aggressively pushing ahead…
First, there are several other cases progressing through the lower courts that will be affected by the outcome of this appeal…Delay in resolution will simply complicate the work of district courts and Circuit Courts of Appeal throughout the country, as more applications are filed and more disputes arise.
Second, this appeal is a matter of great importance to virtually every locality in the nation. While this appeal is pending, Local Government Petitioners and Supporting Intervenors and similarly situated parties are confronted with uncertainty as to how to develop and apply local standards for small cell deployment, which is rapidly occurring…
Third, the Commission is not waiting for this Court to decide the validity of the Orders challenged on appeal. In fact, the Commission is currently building on those Orders, which makes possibly unwinding them all the more difficult.
The FCC opposes anything that would speed up what increasingly looks like a case it will lose. Its response says, in effect, there’s no reason to hurry, because any problems that are created can be fixed later. That was the gist of a ruling earlier this year by federal appellate judges in Denver, just before they handed everything off to their colleagues in San Francisco.
That’s a line of argument that might apply equally well to the FCC’s preemption orders, which also set tight deadlines for action on permit applications filed with local government by telecoms companies.