- Permits to cross fiber over railroad can cost from $5K up to $110K, said a Uniti exec
- Figuring out who to contact at the railroad company is a “needle in the haystack,” said FiberCom CEO Brendan West
- Panelists stressed the need for more shot clocks and transparency from municipalities
INCOMPAS POLICY SUMMIT, WASHINGTON D.C. – We’ve heard time and time again about permitting bottlenecks from operators, but railroads – and the associated high costs – present the biggest one of all, said panelists at an Incompas event today.
Ben Sanborn, senior counsel at Conterra Networks, said not only can it take 12-15 months just to get a response from the railroad companies, the permit itself can cost tens of thousands of dollars. “It’s like $5,000 [just] to submit the application,” he noted.
David Avery, VP of government affairs at Uniti, similarly flagged average railroad permitting costs that vary from $5,000 to as much as $20,000. Recently, the company received estimates for two permits that cost a staggering $70,000 and $110,000, respectively “that we’re analyzing to determine what’s the basis.”
In Sanborn’s view, “It’s going to take us longer to fight this in court than it is to sort of go through the process,” he said, which is why he welcomes proposed legislation like the RAIL Act that aims to clarify the notification and application process for fiber railroad crossings.
Aside from the high application fees, it’s often difficult for operators to know who actually owns the railroads, said Brendan West, CEO at FiberCom. Figuring out who to contact is “another needle in the haystack, and he argued the railroads themselves are to blame for making the process so complicated.
“They don’t make it easy because they don’t want you. It’s that simple,” West said. “And don’t forget, railroads have fiber…they don’t want you to get fiber in certain areas because they also sell strands of fiber.”
How can we fix permitting?
In a keynote this morning, Federal Communications Commissioner (FCC) Olivia Trusty stressed permitting reform is among the agency’s top priorities.
“Pole attachment reform and streamlining permitting processes are not abstract policy issues,” she stated. “They directly affect how quickly and efficiently networks can be built.”
As to how to address lengthy processes, transparency is a good start, said Ariane Schaffer, head of Public Policy and Government Affairs at GFiber. Because permitting often “gets stalled in an area that we didn’t know existed.”
She pointed to some cities that are moving in the right direction on transparency. For instance, Des Moines, Iowa, established a self-service portal that has a searchable database of all the public and active permits, no login required.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, created a new system called the Albuquerque Planning & Logistics Network to help users manage individual projects. “Within a year, they have seen so much success because they know who to hold accountable,” Schaffer said, as well as uncover issues that “in the past would have stayed pretty quiet.”
On the software side, West said FiberCom’s SkyWare platform uses AI to essentially “kick back a permit if it’s missing anything that’s incomplete, which is meant to help teams that don’t have the budge to hire more staff.
Congress in December also introduced legislation that would establish shot clocks for state and local permitting processes.
Sanborn said North Carolina, where Conterra is based, created a shot clock for municipalities that gives them 30 days to approve or reject a permit, otherwise the application is deemed approved.
That’s “a really good baseline standard,” he said, while acknowledging the process isn’t perfect, noting the state’s statute has a loophole where it “does not appear to apply to the North Carolina DOT…and it certainly doesn’t apply to the railroads.”
And even if the “deemed approved” requirement is in place, the municipality doesn’t always issue the permit right away, said Rebecca Hussey, associate general counsel of Government Relations at Crown Castle. “So there has to be some solution provided.”