The General Assembly has passed a bill aimed at solving disputes in the commonwealth’s broadband deployment quest.
The Senate and House of Delegates combined separate legislation on the same subject last week, and the final product awaits Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s consideration. Both houses had unanimously passed their own versions — House Majority Leader Charniele Herring’s HB 800 and Sen. David Marsden’s SB 713 — last month.
That ended a chapter that found Virginia’s electric cooperatives in disagreement with internet service providers, including one in particular, All Points Broadband, which had openly supported the Senate bill.
The pandemic era exposed a need for broadband access in remote areas, and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, ARPA for short, addressed that need.
ISPs, which are stringing cable across utility poles, and the utilities that own the poles in question have disagreed about the time it takes for utilities to approve the work required and who must pay to replace outdated poles or add new ones. That is important, with a Dec. 31, 2026, deadline to spend about $750 million in federal pandemic relief funds or risk having the government take back the leftover money. Virginia officials estimate that about 162,000 locations have weak internet access or none at all.
But the bills as introduced sparked more disagreements, particularly from the rural cooperatives, the only utilities that the proposals actually addressed.
Compromises during the legislative session mitigated the co-ops’ three key concerns: increased rates to customers for replacing poles, nullification of existing contracts, and danger to co-op workers tying additional cables onto existing ones, in a method called “overlashing.”
“We are grateful to the bill patrons for recognizing [the potential problems] and working with us to reach a true compromise, and we are pleased that this compromise passed both the Senate and the House,” said Sadie Gary, public affairs director for the Virginia, Maryland and Delaware Association of Electric Cooperatives. “Together, we will continue to expedite broadband deployment and keep costs low for our cooperative members and ratepayers.”
Richmond-based Jimmy Carr, chief executive of All Points Broadband, has said that he had encountered cooperatives that were asking at least twice the going rate for pole replacement, due to issues that were not the ISP’s fault. A single pole can cost between $5,000 and $20,000, depending on the type of pole and the load it carries.
In a recent interview, Carr said that All Points, through the Virginia Telecommunications Initiative, or VATI, will build out its broadband fiber to about 80,000 “passings,” or locations that can access the cable. The state created VATI in 2022; ARPA included a final deadline of Dec. 31, 2026.
“This is a contentious issue all around, but in the end there was compromise, also all around, and the process resulted in a good outcome,” Carr said.
The combined legislation includes provisions that incorporate some federal rules into the process while installing the State Corporation Commission as arbiter. Federal Communications Commission rules apply to disputes between ISPs and the state’s large investor-owned utilities, Appalachian Power and Dominion Energy, both of which are in the deployment mix.
But Virginia has no such referee to deal with disagreements about timetables and costs among ISPs and electric cooperatives. Yet those groups have been working together, and sometimes at odds, on projects that VATI is funding with federal, state, local and private money totaling more than $1 billion.
The new legislation adds FCC rules to an existing Virginia law governing pole attachments. According to those rules, getting fiber strung across poles should take no more than 165 days after pole inspections and engineering analyses. The bills also require “the reasonable, actual cost” of any pole rearrangement required to string up the cable.
The SCC would hear any disputes about timing or cost within 120 days. Municipal-owned utilities are part of a separate state law and were not covered in the new legislation.
Carr, the ISP executive, has said that the so-called make-ready process, in which poles are examined and engineered for new attachments, is the primary issue, particularly due to the length of time it takes. He has said that it would cost twice as much to run the cable underground, a method that other ISPs have undertaken.
Another $1.4 billion is expected in Virginia, via the federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, or BEAD. All sides agreed during this legislative session that if the current issues were not resolved, broadband deployment could become even more complicated.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly’s budget conferees are considering several amendments designed to mitigate some of the costs and help make broadband accessible statewide by decade’s end. Those amendments wound up proposing about $50 million combined during each of the next two fiscal years for VATI projects, and $30 million for the make-ready issues involved with preparing utility poles for broadband fiber.
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